How Sleep Apnea Care Dovetails With Functional Medicine

This article was written by our partners at KONK.

Functional medicine is a patient-centered approach to healthcare that focuses on identifying and addressing the root causes of disease, rather than merely treating symptoms or downstream complications. Functional medicine views the body as an interconnected whole, and not as isolated organs or organ systems.  From that philosophy, functional medicine has emerged as a discipline open to principles of conventional medicine, though in collaboration with integrative and alternative approaches – with an emphasis on lifestyle, nutrition, genetics, and environmental factors.

Sleep health, in general – and sleep apnea care, specifically – is an important foundation of functional medical care.  When viewed through the prism of some of functional medicine’s chief tenets, Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) care represents a keystone in the management of those patients it affects.

Root Cause Resolution represents the principle that illness should not be addressed at its endpoint symptom, but at its inciting cause.  OSA, for instance, is often the first domino to fall in downstream illnesses such as mood disorders (anxiety and depression), chronic headaches, and erectile dysfunction.  But OSA is often the root cause of diseases that directly affect mortality, such as heart attack, stroke, and car accidents from sleepy driving.  Evidence has emerged that OSA is also a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive dysfunction, and in its mild form OSA can have a significant impact on those who practice active lifestyles: athletes, for example, who have even mild OSA may have that to blame for performance plateaus, increasing duration of recovery times during training, and an increased rate of injury with slow healing.

As such, OSA care is a cornerstone in another important functional medicine principle:  Prevention and Health Optimization.  Those who are treated earlier in the course of their OSA are more likely to avoid the development of hypertension, abnormal heart rhythms such as atrial fibrillation, and non-vascular cardiac complications such as stroke.  And OSA care, particularly when initiated before it increases in severity, is an effective intervention for the prevention of numerous metabolic diseases, including Type 2 diabetes, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, and, in women, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and fertility issues.

Functional medicine also promotes an Emphasis on Nutrition and Lifestyle – with healthy sleep as an important component, and a behavior that exerts an outsize influence on the manner in which we eat.  Functional medicine practitioners quite prominently encourage their patients to view sleep as a pillar of health equal in importance to diet and exercise.  Untreated OSA, in this manner, is no different from someone who takes all his medications, but continues to eat unhealthy foods, or remains sedentary during the day.

Finally, OSA care is central to the Systems Biology-Based Model – after all, what part of the body does poor sleep not affect? OSA has been implicated in cardiovascular disease, neurologic disease, endocrine disease, kidney disease, gastrointestinal disease. The list is as numerous as our body has parts, and these relationships are all bi-directional: In other words, the quality of our sleep has not only an effect on these other organ systems, but these other organ systems have an equal effect on our sleep.