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New developments are showing that the monosodium urate crystals that cause gout result from excess uric acid caused by the oxygen deprivation of sleep apnea. Refer to the letter to the editor in the medical journal sleep, feb 05, entitled "gout is an indicator of sleep apnea". Initial screening of gout patients is showing that almost all have sleep apnea. Gout appears to be an early unignorable warning of sleep apnea, whose long term effects can be high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and even sudden death, as happened with former star football player reggie white. Anyone with gout should be tested for sleep apnea. If sleep apnea is present, follow your doctor's advice to get rid of it. It could save your life! It should also cure your gout, as it did for me.




Now that this information is known, I think that the warning of gout is analogous to the warning of a painfully loud fire alarm. The sensible thing to do is to make sure there is no fire, or in this case no sleep apnea. A much more dangerous approach is to ignore the alarm (just live with the gout) or to switch the alarm off without making sure there is no fire (suppressing the gout by mainstream or alternative medicine without testing for sleep apnea). Once you're sure that there is no fire, then it's safe to conclude that the alarm is false and switch off the alarm.

How do you get tested for sleep apnea? I notice that sometimes I think I am dreaming that i'm dying or falling unconsicous, and then I try to wake up and I can't. When I finally wake up I am breathing real hard and it feels like I wasnt dreaming, that I was actually losing consciousness but couldnt' wake up. This happens more often if I try to nap during the day and not so often at night. Also, it seems to happen when I party the night before. Any advice ?

Also, I think I have gout, but I have another post in the forum on that. I also have a family history of diabetes and heart disease, even though I don't have high blood sugar or any other signs of that.

The definitive way to test for sleep apnea is by monitoring of sleep behavior overnight in a sleep lab, usually prescribed by a doctor. But there are ways of testing yourself first to see if you should prod your doctor for the sleep lab test.

The first things involve sleep habits, so they are usually better tested by your sleeping partner. If you snore, then you very likely have sleep apnea; and if you don’t snore, then you probably don’t have it. If you stop breathing for many seconds at a time and then restart with a loud snort, then you almost certainly have it. Sometimes an apnea episode will cause you to wake up and maybe realize that you have to go to the bathroom, so frequent trips to the bathroom or frequent waking periods may indicate sleep apnea. If you get attacks of gout while you are sleeping, then you almost certainly have it. You can use a pulse oximeter to monitor the percentage of oxygen in your blood while you are sleeping, as I described in my website www.Freewebs.Com/goutcure . Sleep apnea is more likely to occur after drinking alcohol.

The second thing involves your behavior during waking hours. Because your sleep is so restless, you may find that you nod off to sleep almost uncontrollably when you don’t want to. Many traffic accidents have been caused by people with sleep apnea dozing off while driving.

Because sleep apnea is so common, so woefully underdiagnosed, and so potentially dangerous, doctors should routinely screen their patients for it. Very few do. So it us up to each of us to educate ourselves enough to know when to prod our doctors to check us, and remediate the apnea when it is detected. It could be a matter of life or death.