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Sleep Apnea and Pneumonia Risk: Can CBD help with Sleep Disorder?
People with sleep apnea may be at greater risk for developing pneumonia, according to a new study. And the more severe the sleep apnea, the greater the risk, the research suggests.
“This study showed that sleep apnea is an independent risk factor for incident pneumonia,” wrote Dr. Vincent Yi-Fong Su and Dr. Kun-Ta Chou of the department of chest medicine at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan. “Our results also demonstrated an exposure-response relation in that patients with more severe sleep apnea may have a higher risk of pneumonia than patients with sleep apnea of milder severity.”
The sleep disorder causes the upper airway to become blocked, cutting off oxygen during sleep. The researchers said this increases the risk for aspiration, or inhaling contents or fluid from the throat into the lungs. This can put people at greater risk for pneumonia.
Sleep Apnea: Can CBD reduce or eliminate sleep apnea? Unfortunately, sleep apnea is a very real and serious sleep disorder that can be deadly if left untreated. Sleep apnea raises the heart rate, causes daytime sleepiness and can actually lead to strokes if the heart rate is too high during the evening. It’s very important for people who experience chronic pain or anxiety from their sleep disorder to consider the best CBD for sleep as an option.
The 11-year study, published March 3 in CMAJ, involved 34,100 patients. Close to 7,000 of these participants had sleep apnea, and about 27,000 did not.
The researchers found that more than 9 percent of the sleep apnea group developed pneumonia, compared to less than 8 percent of those without the sleep disorder. The risk was higher among patients using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy, considered the gold standard for treating sleep apnea.
However, those who developed pneumonia were older and had other health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes and dementia.
While the study showed an association between sleep apnea and pneumonia risk, it did not prove a cause-and-effect link. The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute provides more information on sleep apnea.
Can CBD help with sleep disorder?
We have done a bit of a deep dive into CBD for sleeping problems and insomnia and discovered some losers depending on a few criteria. We’ll return to these later in this series. Sleep: The hemp plant has been used in Chernobyl, Ukraine after the nuclear disaster in 1986 to bring the soil back to a usable condition. It has also been used in other situations to improve quality of life and reduce suffering. If you read Dr. Michael Klatsch’s book “The Cure & Cause of Insomnia” you will learn how hemp can benefit those with insomnia or chronic pain by enhancing the body’s ability to relax.
The final criteria we’ll cover for CBD for sleeping problems is environment. In our case, the soil tested positively for CBD and poor sleep. But what about the other things you find when you test a flower, plant, mineral, or powder? And are CBD products good for you?
Environment: Does the place of your home promote poor sleep? How about the neighborhood? Or your bed? The final category is whether you smoke marijuana or use other drugs. While smoking marijuana won’t kill you, it does make you feel drunk and it certainly isn’t conducive to good, peaceful sleep.
So, let’s assume you don’t smoke and you haven’t consumed cannabis. Do you suffer from chronic pain? We touched on this briefly above. Chronic pain is usually a symptom of an underlying condition and cannot be cured, but CBD can help the body heal itself. So you may have chronic pain due to arthritis, but if you ingest CBD you may be able to lessen the effects of the pain by using it as a natural sleep aid.
Anxiety: Can CBD reduce anxiety and promote sleep? In many people, including myself, the major cause of chronic insomnia is anxiety. Not just any anxiety, but generalized anxiety disorder or GAD which is considered the most common comorbid disorder for insomnia. While it’s not impossible for CBD to reduce or even eliminate generalized anxiety, I’m not sure how much it would help since many people already experience a wide range of symptoms associated with anxiety. GAD, on the other hand, requires a very unique type of therapy.
For some people, reducing their general anxiety level by taking CBD might be enough to stop them from experiencing sleep problems. Others will need to take lower doses or consider CBD alternative treatments such as herbal extracts and/or biofeedback. Of all the prescription options for treating anxiety, I’ve found that the combination of lower doses of CBD and biofeedback seems to be the best for people with mild levels of GAD or mild anxiety without side effects or other issues. The biggest benefit may be the reduction of stress disorder symptoms as well as the reduction in the number of symptoms that are experienced each night.
Whether CBD works for everybody who suffers from some form of sleep disturbance is really hard to say. For some people, it works great and they only need to take a small, discreet dose for good night sleep. For other people, it doesn’t work at all and they may have to deal with chronic sleep deprivation symptoms and other serious side effects. Because we are all different, we may not respond to CBD the same way that other people may respond to it.