The national heart lung and blood institute defines sleep apnea as a disorder where you have one or more pauses in breathing or shallow breath when you sleep.  This can last for a few seconds to a few minutes and usually occur 5 to 30 times or more an hour.  Sleep apnea is an ongoing condition that disrupts sleep, typically moving someone from a deep sleep to a light sleep, leading to poor sleep quality.   

Over the past 10 years, there is a clear change in sleep apnea for younger patients.  With the rise in childhood obesity, there are now many overweight children that have cases of sleep apnea similar to adults.  In many cases, children with sleep apnea do not act sleepy in the daytime, instead they respond with hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and other attention deficit like symptoms.  The two primary causes of sleep apnea are large tonsils and adenoids (lumpy clusters of spongy tissue to protect a child’s mouth) because they block airflow to the lungs.  Removing tonsils or adenoids resolves 80 to 90 percent of sleep apnea cases.

For obese children, the tonsils often become enlarged and fat deposits in the neck and chest impact airways during sleep.  For obese children, removing the tonsils or adenoidectomy is only effective 50% of the time.  The other solution is continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), which is a machine that makes breathing easier.  

Obesity influences the likelihood of sleep apnea and having sleep apnea increases the likelihood of weight gain.  Researchers studied subjects who were only allowed to sleep for four hours per night and noticed that their leptin levels were abnormally low and their ghrelin levels were abnormally high.  Leptin is used by the body to make people feel full while ghrelin makes people hungry.  

I find the correlation between obesity and weight gain to be quite surprising.  I assumed that people who cannot sleep properly would lose weight instead of gain weight.  This is probably why I am always still hungry after my late night snack.