An Easy Way to Cure Sleep Apnea—Permanently

The most commonly prescribed treatment for sleep apnea is continuous positive airway pressure devices that involve sleeping with a mask over the face and beside a noisy machine.

If this sounds like a terrible solution, the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine has now published a new study that offers a better alternative.

The researchers collected the information of 155,448 adult residents of Ontario that had first been collected by the Ontario Health Study. Their subjects had an average age of 46, 75 percent of them were white, and 60 percent were women.

The information included their levels of physical activity, their sleep quality, their sleep apnea status, their weight, their age, their sex, and a whole range of additional sociodemographic, lifestyle, and medical information.

Those subjects who had sleep apnea were more sedentary than healthy sleepers were, reporting that they sat for a median of 4.4 more hours per week.

This means that half of them sat for more than 4.4 hours per week longer than healthy sleepers did, which is already an important finding.

When the researchers analyzed further, they noticed that higher physical activity levels were linked to a reduced risk of sleep apnea.

They found that small increases in physical activity, such as adding 20 minutes to a leisurely walk or 8 minutes of strenuous exercise to a daily routine could reduce the risk of sleep apnea by 10 percent.

It may seem obvious that exercise works probably because it reduces obesity, which is a known cause of sleep apnea.

But these scientists adjusted their results to ensure that known causes of sleep apnea like sex, age, and obesity did not interfere, meaning that exercise was an independent standalone method to prevent and/or treat sleep apnea.

When the benefits of weight loss were added as benefits of exercise to prevention and treatment of sleep apnea, then exercise is even more effective.

But the easiest and most effective way to cure sleep apnea (and snoring) permanently are actually simple throat exercises—explained here—that only take 3 minutes per day…