Sorry about that--I spent too much time in grad school and forget that most of the world does not speak jargon.

Basically, what they are saying is that there is a strong relationship between sleep apnea and hormone disorders including diabetes and polycystic ovarian disorder (a disorder that afflicts only women, named after ovarians, but really a syndrome strongly related to insulin resistance).

Many people don't realize that diabetes is fundamentally a hormonal disorder, and insulin resistance (body's inability to use insulin properly) causes other hormones to be off balance. For example, by having too much circulating insulin, women with PCOS also end up having too much testosterone an...

Sorry about that--I spent too much time in grad school and forget that most of the world does not speak jargon.

Basically, what they are saying is that there is a strong relationship between sleep apnea and hormone disorders including diabetes and polycystic ovarian disorder (a disorder that afflicts only women, named after ovarians, but really a syndrome strongly related to insulin resistance).

Many people don't realize that diabetes is fundamentally a hormonal disorder, and insulin resistance (body's inability to use insulin properly) causes other hormones to be off balance. For example, by having too much circulating insulin, women with PCOS also end up having too much testosterone and too little progestrone. This leads to infertility because eggs do not get properly released.

It looks as though several symptoms are clustering together: 1) lack of decent deep sleep with REM, 2) insulin resistance, 3) general bodily inflammation, 4) low oxygen levels during sleep (due to apnea), and 5) hormonal imbalances.

It is currently a large system of relationships among variables, with feedback loops and everything. In other words, scientists *know* that sleep disorders and hormone disorders are connected, but they don't know what causes what.