Longevity Project: Mitigating sleep apnea adds years to your life

Editor’s note: This is the third installment of the series The Longevity Project, a collaboration between The Aspen Times and the Glenwood Springs Post Independent.

There’s more to mitigating sleep apnea than just a good night’s rest for Aspen cosmetic dentist Andrew Turchin, DMD. 

“There’s so many things that happen, from cardiovascular to memory, to just getting up and not getting a full night’s sleep,” he said of the negative impacts of sleep apnea. “And what I think it’s not spoken about enough is the amount of sleep our bed partners get.”

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There’s a common misconception that sleep apnea, an obstructive disorder that affects breathing patterns while asleep, only impacts people with weight issues. According to Turchin, however, even the ostensibly healthy City of Aspen has a diverse set of patients who encounter this ailment.

He operates The Ageless Smile in downtown Aspen and has also been treating sleep apnea for years. He said his sleep apnea patients even include the “60-year-old, very thin women who absolutely don’t fit the stereotype of sleep apnea.”

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Turchin said, according to several studies, about 80% people with sleep apnea are undiagnosed, and 50% of those people still go untreated.

“They estimate that it could be seven to 10 years off someone’s life if they have something like severe sleep apnea that’s untreated,” he said.

Risks run the gamut. Untreated sleep apnea can lead to memory loss, cardiovascular issues, uncontrolled blood pressure, and an unmitigated increase of the stress hormone cortisol, which can lead to obesity. According to Mayo Clinic online, too much cortisol exposure also increases the risk of anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, muscle tension and pain, heart disease and heart attacks, and stroke.

Meanwhile, the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep is neglected when sleep apnea persists. This stage of sleep allows muscles to fully lose control and rejuvenate the body. This leads to sleep deprivation, thus heightening the risks of accidents at work, according to Turchin.

“Train operators, truck drivers are all supposed to be tested,” he said. “But sometimes things slip through the cracks, where they stop using their (sleep) devices.”

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His sleep apnea treatment is a multifaceted process. His practice first offers free sleep screenings. After a screening, the data is reviewed and a diagnosis is made. Depending on the severity of the sleep apnea, sometimes he will offer the patient a continuous positive airway device (CPAP) — a sleep mask that treats the sleep-related breathing disorder. For moderate or mild conditions, the patient is given oral devices.

“Sometimes, somebody just has positional apnea. The testing system will tell us whether, when someone’s snoring, if people are just positional,” he said. “In other words, they only snore on their back, and on their side, they never snore. Oh, great, then we can talk about positional therapy.”

Turchin then lives for the positive results of the treatment.

“It’s just so gratifying when someone says I have so much energy, I’ve hiked further today than I ever have, or I kicked butt in pilates,” he said. “It feels great.”

The Ageless Smile is located at 400 W. Main St., suite 100. It can be reached at 970-925-7730, or take its 3-minute sleep apnea quiz at andrewturchin.com/services/sleep-apnea-snoring-treatment. 

Over the counter

Trying to treat sleep deprivation also triggers people to seek medication.

Brice McConnell, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor of Neurology and Director of the Sleep Research Program at the University of Colorado. He maintains that sleep medications can ironically reverse the intended goal of a good night’s rest. 

McConnell, who researches age-related neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s, said proper sleep is a critical neuro-protector that helps remodel and restore the human brain. Sleep also is understood to be a protector of pathological aging.

But when folks can’t nab enough sleep, they seek accessible sleep aids like Benadryl or its generic version of diphenhydramine, as well as other pharmaceuticals like Tylenol PM and other “PM-based” sleep aids. As a neurodegenerative disease specialist, he maintains that these medications are linked to sleep rhythm disruption.

“As of now, the medications for sleep don’t reproduce normal sleep physiology,” he said. “Oftentimes, we think about sleep rather simply as sort of turning our brains off. But that’s really not the case. We flip a switch when we fall asleep, but the switch turns on a brain maintenance mode.

“The older we get, the more vulnerable we are to these medication-related problems,” he added. 

People in their mid-60s start becoming more vulnerable to disrupting their circadian sleep rhythm.

“There are population-wide studies that show that there’s a small but measurable risk of people taking those medications chronically and increasing their risk of getting Alzheimer’s or related disorder,” he said. “But we also know that the older we get, the more powerful those medications are at causing some fogginess to our thinking the day after we use them.”

Right now, McConnell and his fellow researchers are figuring out what treatment is most protective of sleep. He said he’s using digital biomarkers to help decode brainwaves and understand how the brain functions during sleep. 

Biomarkers come in the form of simple headbands and wearable technology applied when catching Zs, according to him. This method records data from the brain, which helps determine whether the brain is getting enough protective sleep.

“One of our driving interests now is understanding what could we be doing differently, from a pharmaceutical development standpoint, to really get more normal sleep,” he said.