Roughly thirty million adults have obstructive sleep apnea. Eighty percent have never been diagnosed. It's not the gasping cartoon version - it's hundreds of silent airway collapses a night, a brain yanked out of deep sleep just often enough to keep breathing and never enough to remember it happened. The average time from first symptom to actual diagnosis: over seven years.
What a sleep study actually measures, and what the number on the report means. Why the machine that works gets abandoned by half the people who own one, and the specific, fixable reasons why. The stroke and heart disease risk almost nobody connects back to a snoring complaint dismissed for a decade. What to do when the standard treatment genuinely doesn't fit your life, and the real alternatives nobody mentions.
The diagnosis takes seven years on average. The test takes one night.
