Narcolepsy, Sleep apnea, or sleep terrors? Which one is more dangerous in your opinion?
by Sarah Aniston
Filed under Sleep Apnea Books
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Narcolepsy is the most dangerous. A person can fall asleep at any time, anywhere. Sleep apnea is not good either nor are sleep terrors, but they won’t accidentally hurt themselves or others. I mean, if a person fell asleep at the wheel – ut oh.
I think it’s narcolepsy because you can suddenly fall asleep whithout warning while driving a car or operating other dangerous machinery.
Narcolepsy – If it’s severe, it could cause a person to fall asleep at an unsafe time, such as while driving.
Sleep apnea – probably the most dangerous in the long run. Never getting enough sleep is dangerous for your health, as well as interfering with your ability to drive properly. (Risk varies, but 40% overall increased mortality is the simplest number I could find)
Sleep terrors – unpleasant, but unlikely to cause premature death.
sleep apnea, without a doubt.
it affects MANY aspects of the human body & can cause problems like depression, headaches, impotence & loss of memory. it also commonly causes severe health issues like high blood pressure (which in turn eventually leads to strokes) or heart disease (which can then cause heart failure).
it also causes daytime sleepiness since the sleep cycle has been disrupted all night long…this in turn makes them just as likely to do something like fall asleep as a person with narcolepsy. one could argue that it makes them MORE susceptible to falling asleep unexpectedly since most narcoleptics know their own limits when it comes to things like driving or operating machinery. we take things like not dying in a fiery ball of crushed metal very seriously and tend to not do things like drive while sleepy…whereas many folks with apnea don’t realize just how much of a risk their own sleep deprivation is causing them to be.
the worst risk for narcoleptics comes from cataplexies, not falling asleep. if we have a cataplexy while walking down stairs, for example, we may fall down them & hurt ourselves. however, these are emotion-based not caused by sleep, and as long as we know our trigger emotion (mine for example is extreme anger) & keep that in check, this risk is greatly limited.