Exercise & Apnea: Blessing or Curse?
© Kerrin Leon White
However, this finding does take a step beyond the commonplace advice to people with difficulty sleeping--usually insomnia--that moderate aerobic exercise, not too close to bedtime, will help improve sleep. Furthermore, while it is widely believed that weight loss will improve sleep apnea, it is not so well established that improvement in conditioning without substantial weight loss can accomplish similar results.
Normally, we should all feel encouraged at anything that points towards another stratagem for helping apnea. Sadly, however, I cannot feel unmixed satisfaction at this news.
What troubles me is the fear that this kind of finding will encourage the common practice of doctors, nurses, and other clinicians who already like to over-stress the importance of diet and exercise as means of controlling apnea. It is not just the fact that sometimes such measures fail to work. The benign aspect of this advice is all too often undermined by an underlying presumption that whoever fails to implement these salutary measures assumes responsibility and even blame for continuing to suffer from the disease!
Does the fallacy implicit in this kind of thinking come through clearly on its own? In case it doesn't, let me belabor the point a bit.
I am quite willing to accept that exercise--or even just a modest increase in activity--will benefit people with sleep apnea. It makes sense; there is nothing extraordinary about the idea.
What does not surface so readily is the equally commensense understanding that a person with sleep apnea may fail to exercise for some very powerful reasons. Most obvious among these is the almost constant fatigue that bedevils the person with uncontrolled apnea.
It is one thing for someone afflicted with perpetual exhaustion to exercise as part of a short-term clinical research program. It is quite another for such a person to maintain such a program over the long haul. It is still another thing for those without the structure of a special program to initiate this kind of regimen on their own. Surely the action of regularly getting dressed and going out to walk or jog, perhaps in the face of cold and wet or snow and ice, may take more than just great effort under such circumstances.
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