Healthy Living

Sleep Apnea in Women: Why Is It So Misdiagnosed?

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Sleep Apnea in Women: Why Is It So Misdiagnosed?

A disorder that affects a lot of people in America but tends to remain unnoticed.

Although sexism is a problem that should have been left aside long ago, it still affects many people in every aspect of their daily lives. It can be extremely bothersome and cause discomfort in any moment of the day, either going to work, exercising on the street, going to class or any other activity which leads to interacting with other people. However, the dimensions reached by this problem seem like they can also unintendedly affect the diagnosis process of certain conditions.

There are a couple of worrisome facts affecting female community when it comes to healthcare statistics. First of all, clinical trials testing drugs and medical devices do not take into account of the entire female population as they should. Once the effects of a specific device or a drug have a negative effect on pregnant women, warnings are put on a label and there is no further investigation whether it can or cannot affect women that are not going through pregnancy.

In most studies, women represent only 30% of the total population participating in the medical trial process. Also, the results of said trials are not separated by gender, which must be done taking into account the hormonal variation between men and women. Nevertheless, one of the most worrying facts about women and the general disregard in most medical studies is directly linked to sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is currently one of the conditions that is often misdiagnosed in women, mostly because there is no much information about the symptoms it causes in the female population and how they differ from the ones displayed by men. Because of this lack of information, it's very difficult to diagnose. Taking into account that it is way more common in men, women have been left aside in researches that look to sharpen the diagnosis process. Though, the importance of misdiagnosing a potentially deadly disorder is not reduced.

Differences between men and women

While most diseases can be exactly the same for men and women, in some cases, certain conditions may trigger different symptoms. Due to the inequality in medical trials, symptoms displayed by men tend to get more attention in popular medical studies. The aforementioned settlement is the main reason doctors tend to misdiagnose women suffering from sleep apnea, given that certain ailments do not match the symptoms doctors are taught to look for when suspecting someone suffers sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is a disorder that usually causes many pauses in breathing while people are asleep. It also shallows breathing, reducing the amount of oxygen the brain receives considerably. This condition is quite common among Americans with about one in five Americans have at least a case of mild obstructive sleep apnea.

In most cases, women suffering from sleep apnea tend to be misdiagnosed with other problems such as hypochondria, depression and hypertension. Doctors suspect that these essential differences in diagnostic criteria may be part of the reasons why in a general overview, men are two times more likely to be diagnosed with this condition than women are.