Regularly getting enough quality sleep every night is essential to optimal performance during the day. Alternatively, not getting enough sleep can be detrimental, not only to a person's daily life, but also to their health, according to Reggie Westerfield, lab manager and technologist at Southern Missouri Sleep Center (SMSC) in Poplar Bluff.
"Sleep is one of those things people take for granted, until they can't. It's all consuming," Westerfield said.
Located inside the Black River Medical Center, or Coppertop, SMSC aims to help patients by treating and diagnosing sleeping disorders, including obstructive sleep apnea, rapid eye movement (REM) behavior disorder, narcolepsy, and restless legs syndrome.
"Apnea is a bulk of our work - it's the most common sleep disorder," Westerfield said. "Sleep Apnea has been around for years but the education of the public about it has really increased recently. When I started this, (patients) wouldn't know why they were here and now they come in asking questions like, 'Oh, I saw this on TV.'"
Westerfield said two of the primary signs of sleep apnea are snoring and daytime fatigue.
"Apnea is basically when someone stops breathing when they fall asleep and it's caused by, basically, just a loss of muscle tension," he said. "The muscles in the neck relax and gravity pulls all that soft tissue down, closing the airway off. Then the brain starts to realize it's not getting enough oxygen and panics and wakes itself up. So there's another problem you run into there."
Westerfield said an individual must be awake for 30 seconds at night before they either know they are awake or before they remember being awake, which he said doesn't sound like a long time "until you count off 30 seconds."
"Especially if a person's sleep deprived, they're going to fall back to sleep before they even know they're awake," Westerfield said. "So they could be waking up 20, 30, 40 times an hour and never even knowing it. You can sleep for 14 hours straight and if you're waking up 30 times an hour, it's not going to do for your brain what six hours of consolidated sleep is going to do."
Westerfield said the technicians at SMSC strive to reduce the number of awakenings to as few as possible with a goal of establishing consolidated, quality sleep.
"There are four stages of sleep and the brain wants to cycle through them in a particular order, but if it has to wake up to breathe, it's not going to be able to complete the cycle and you're going to be going back to awake and resetting that cycle over and over again," he explained.
Westerfield said common treatment methods for sleep apnea include a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, which Westerfield called the gold standard, and a mandibular advancement device, which causes the jaw to protrude.
"If the CPAP wasn't a life changer, we wouldn't have jobs," he said. "I mean, nobody is necessarily lining up to wear a mask to sleep but it's just cut and dry. Especially for the people toward the moderate to severe end of the spectrum."
Westerfield said untreated apnea can lead to heart disease, increased blood pressure, and fatigue. He said continuously waking up throughout the night is hard on the cardiovascular system, as it causes the body to repeat damaging cycles.
"A patient will stop breathing, their blood pressure drops, their heart rate drops, and as soon as they wake up it skyrockets," he explained. "They basically sit there with a roller coaster effect on their heart all night long which is a huge contributor to heart disease. It's good to get tested just to feel better, but for heart health, it's a must."
Westerfield said education is another service provided at SMSC, which he feels is of the utmost importance. He said explaining to someone why they are there and why treatment is important helps establish the path to success.
"While the technical aspect of our job is important, the education really is crucial because we can send someone home with a tool and just say use it, or we can send it home and explain why they need to use it and what benefits come from using it," Westerfield said. "A person's going to be a lot more likely to be compliant and follow through that treatment when they know why and what benefits come from it."
Westerfield said he regularly hears people say that they don't have a sleep problem because they can sleep anytime, any place, which, he added, isn't always a good thing. Westerfield said if the brain is receiving the necessary amount of sleep it needs to function, it shouldn't be trying to "go to sleep at so many different times."
"Many times people come in reluctantly and leave thinking, 'Why did I wait this long,'" he added.
The Southern Missouri Sleep Center can be reached at 573-727-9661.