Help for Truck Drivers with Sleep Apnea

Posted in The Healthy Trucker by Brian ·  

Sleep apnea; you’ve probably heard a lot about it in recent years. It’s characterized by loud snoring, depression, restless sleep, and struggling to breathe while sleeping. If you suffer from sleep apnea, it could very well affect how alert you are during waking hours. Thankfully, there is help for truck drivers with sleep apnea.

Maybe you’re not sure if you have sleep apnea or not. Do you sleep for a full eight hours and yet feel like you need a nap? How often do you become drowsy while you’re driving? Have you ever nodded off while driving? Have you found yourself on the side of the road and don’t remember how you got there? These could be signs that you have sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea affects more than 30 million American. If you’re an adult male who is overweight, there’s 50% likelihood that you’ll develop sleep apnea. Most people with this condition also have high blood pressure. If you already have some breathing problems while you sleep, the chances increase further. Sleep apnea has a tendency to run in families so it may be a genetic condition.

Obviously, if you’re not sleeping well during the night, you’re going to be tired and fatigued during the day. But this isn’t enough to determine if you do, in fact, have this condition. If you sleep with a partner, they may be able to help you decide if you exhibit the most serious symptom – loud snoring accompanied by brief periods where the person stops breathing entirely.

Having sleep apnea could be life-threatening and should be brought to your doctor’s attention. If you do have sleep apnea, and it goes undiagnosed, you could suffer a heart attack, stroke, impotence, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Daytime sleepiness, besides being a health risk, can lead to daytime sleepiness which may result in accidents, loss of productivity, and affect your personal relationships.

To confirm a diagnosis of sleep apnea, your doctor will ask that you attend a sleep study overnight. If you do have sleep apnea they may recommend changes in your diet to help you lose weight, a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine, or medication. Some doctors recommend a pillow that encourages you to sleep in a position other than lying on your back.

A study conducted in during the 1990s showed that truck drivers develop sleep apnea in the same degree that the general public does. They also found that how often a driver was able to sleep in their own bed and sleep for more than six hours. Age, sex of the driver, and their body weight seemed to be the biggest factors in whether or not they developed sleep apnea.

Even though commercial drivers have sleep apnea as often as the general public, that doesn’t mean that the condition in drivers isn’t something to be concerned about. Sleep apnea is the most common sleep disorder and is considered to be treatable. With some changes to your lifestyle, no surgery, and a little time, you may find your sleep apnea is actually reversible, which is a very good thing. Once your sleep apnea is cleared up, you may also find that other health concerns you have are reduced or cleared up, as well.

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