A lot of people suffer from sleep apnea and give us the definition exactly of what that is.

- So sleep apnea, apnea itself, what it means is stoppage of breathing, right?

And we define that for our purposes for more than 10 seconds.

So if you look at the sleep apnea, that's stoppage of breathing while you're sleeping, right?

When you don't know about it and not to go in too many details at this time, a common one is obstructive sleep apnea because there's obstruction in the airways that stops you from breathing and not so common is called central sleep apnea when for some reason, either some abnormality in the brain or some unknown reason, the brain forgets to breathe.

But that's not so common.

So going to the more common one is obstructive sleep apnea.

There's a narrowing of the airways anywhere from posterior oropharyngeal area to the vocal cord.

So somewhere in between and once the people go to sleep, the neck muscle have excessive relaxation for the people who have sleep apnea and they start snoring and snoring and then they're quiet because they're not breathing, right?

When they don't breathe, there's no airflow to the lungs and the whole body gets deprived of oxygen, right?

So brain wakes up, we call micro-arousal.

Patients are not aware of it.

Make the neck muscle go back to normal.

They will start breathing again, get the oxygen.

The brain says, "My job is done," goes to sleep, right?

Neck muscles go back to relaxing again and the same cycle can repeat itself again and again.

Patient may be completely unaware of it.

They may say, "I wake up a few times a night.

I don't know why I wake up but I go back to sleep and I sleep well."

Their complaint is when they wake up in the morning, they say, "I don't feel well-rested."

Most people would say after lunch hours, it's very hard for them to stay awake and if they're relaxing themself in the evening, watching TV, reading a book, whatever, they're unable to kind of finish what they're doing.

So that's what the lack of sleep is doing because the brain keeps waking up every time they stop breathing.