Ask HN: Can you share your experience with sleep apnea?

Improved a lot since I tried a soft mouth guard dentist made me to protect teeth from grinding. Side effect, it reduces my snoaring / sleep apnea also.

I noticed that there are some mixed opinions on nasal vs full face mask. According to some doctors nasal masks are better because you need to be breathing thru the nose and push the tongue out.

Do you have any information on what made the second sleep study better then the first one? Could also share who was the second doctor who helped you?

The first surgeon was incompetent in hindsight. I had meager advancement from the jaw surgery and the expansion pattern was suboptimal (in addition to various complications).

Certainly. I felt the way you describe my whole life until 2016. In 2013 I had a sleep study done. I had what's called central sleep apnea, an issue where the carbon dioxide 'sensor' in my brain stem wasn't functioning properly, so it didn't detect when I needed to breath in again. Not as easy to replace as my car's oxygen sensor unfortunately. I needed a BiPAP, which pushed air in and pulled air out -- first doc put me on a CPAP and it was much worse. BiPAP was not fun but it helped.

I would take the machine to the neurologist monthly or so, he'd read the SD card and show me the results: stopped breathing at least 40-100 times a night.

Fast forward about 3 years, I entered into ketosis -- that's another story, but for now it just means that I stopped eating all carbs, my liver started pulling fat from my diet and fat stores and forming ketones. Muscle would burn the fat, the brain would use the ketones exclusively.

I felt amazing, slept incredibly well, did not nap during the day, was just all manner of incredible things happen from that. Went from 202 to 187 in about 55 days (I wasn't monitoring it, just knew what I'd weighed, and went for a weigh in to get clearance for a gym at work one day and there it was. I was shocked.)

Took the BiPAP machine in about 3 months after going into ketosis: Zero events. I had zero times I stopped breathing at night.

Maybe my cause was different, but I'd bet anyone going into ketosis for a period of months would see healing in the brain that may help this and other issues. I think this because back in the day, epilepsy was treated with a diet that kept patients in ketosis, and after about 6 months, they no longer had epilepsy. Sounds to me like the brain did some repairs it couldn't do when on carbs.

I now think ketosis used to be our natural state before agriculture. Not like there were vending machines with Snickers bars on the savannas we evolved on - high carb diets I don't think existed. Wish I could find the reference, but some research showed that someone on the typical modern diet (high levels of blood glucose) would, when given ketones exogenously (they ate or drank them), have them taken up by the brain immediately -- the brain prefers ketones, even over glucose, the opposite of what we keep being told. Hardly anyone today ever enters ketosis with our diets.

Before doing any further drastic and potentially irreversible things like surgery or drugs, I'd seriously consider trying to get and stay in ketosis for at least 3 months and see how that affects your apnea. It can be a challenge, but not insurmountable. First couple of weeks may be hard, read up on what to do to get through that time, then stick with it for a while.

(EDIT: Forgot to mention, I had GERD too, that's gone. No more acid reflux, even when I eat foods that used to trigger it.)