Stop Breathing While You Sleep? You May Have Sleep Apnea

Ask a person whose partner snores and one shall know how disturbing snoring is for both the person who snores and their partner. Large studies have found that even after controlling for other risk factors, sleep apnea is independently associated with glucose intolerance and insulin resistance and may lead to type 2 diabetes.” Studies have found that treating sleep apnea reduces insulin resistance and improves blood sugar control in people with diabetes.
After menopause, hormones change and women tend to start looking like men in terms of where the weight gets put on. It's a time to be paying attention to the risks of nasal dilator because women begin to catch up to men in the rates of apnea after menopause,” Jun says.

Although the American Academy of Sleep Medicine advocates for physicians to ask all patients about signs and symptoms of OSA, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has no position on this issue, and there are no good outcome studies of net benefit for screening unselected populations.
Unlike obstructive sleep apnea, which is caused by a physical blockage, central sleep apnea is a neurological problem, says Robson Capasso, MD , chief of sleep surgery and associate professor of Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine in California.

Your breathing is interrupted either by a physical blockage to your airway (for example, loose skin in the back of your throat, or perhaps your tongue, blocking your airway), in which case you are said to suffer from obstructive sleep apnea, or by a failure on the part of your brain to send out the necessary signals to the muscles of your body that control breathing, in which event your condition is described as central sleep apnea.
Some of these symptoms of sleep apnea can be confused with symptoms of depression because they are so similar; personality changes, irritability, mood swings, memory problems, feeling lethargic and perhaps even feeling depressed are some of the shared similarities.

Some possible tests include an echocardiogram to look at the structure and function of the heart to evaluate for heart failure and other health problems; an electrocardiogram (EKG) to scan for irregular heartbeat such as atrial fibrillation ; or arterial blood gases to measure levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood.