If just the thought of losing your breath as you sleep is frightening, you should see what it looks like when it really happens.

This video of a man with sleep apnea was posted on the Web site of the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

In the video, the man stops breathing for 40 seconds in his sleep. But what’s even more frightening is what you don’t see: He also operates heavy machinery for a living— and his apnea has left him tired at work.

This can’t end well.

And this video shows just one apnea incident — but patients who have the condition can stop breathing dozens and even hundreds of times each night, depriving the heart and brain of essential oxygen.

One new study finds women who battle the condition have a 350 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease — and other studies have found similar risks for men. Along with heart problems, apnea has been linked to dementia, stroke, diabetes and more — with another new study showing how apnea can even boost your risk of sudden deafness by nearly 50 percent.

In the short term, some apnea patients use continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP machines — uncomfortable oxygen masks that come with risks of their own, and that’s if you can even manage to keep them on all night.

In one study, only two out of 35 patients could tolerate them long enough to see a benefit.

But even if you can handle wearing an oxygen mask all night, it’s not a permanent solution.

In many cases, apnea is caused by obesity — so if you’re overweight and your spouse has seen you lose your breath in the night, drop those extra pounds ASAP and chances are you won’t need CPAP.

And if you’ve gotten too big over the years and find yourself not as rested in the morning as you used to be, you might have the condition, too. Other warning signs to watch for: headaches, waking up with a dry mouth or sore throat, frequent nighttime bathroom trips and mood changes.

A night in a sleep clinic can help you figure it out — but in the meantime, lose the weight anyway. Even if it’s not causing sleep apnea — yet — it’s not doing you any favors.

Think the news media is untrustworthy? Try reading the medical journals.

Major studies are being retracted almost daily for everything from lousy data to outright fraud — and that’s just scratching the surface, because the studies that haven’t been retracted could actually be worse.

A leading medical journal says most of today’s studies are published without key data — omissions that could hurt or even kill patients as doctors unwittingly rely on an incomplete picture of a drug’s risks when they make treatment decisions.

BMJ recently published no less than seven papers on the problems with today’s research — but the biggest are those sins of omission.

One paper shows how quickly incomplete data can turn a snowball into an avalanche as research that combines data from earlier studies — called meta-analyses — ends up magnifying all those flaws and omissions.

Researchers reviewed 41 meta-analyses on nine different meds and found that 38 of them would have had different results if the researchers had access to the missing data.

Think about that next time your doctor offers you a med and cites some important-sounding study in a major medical journal.

In another paper, researchers checked to see how many studies complied with a rule that requires summaries of every single study to be posted on a government Web site, ClinicalTrials.gov within a year of completion.

They found that just 22 percent complied with this “mandatory” rule.

Looks like “mandatory” just ain’t what it used to be, but there’s a reason for that: When a study shows a drug doesn’t work or comes with too many risks, Big Pharma would rather sweep it under the rug — and researchers are often willing to grab a broom and help out.

One study a couple years back found that 85 percent of published company-funded studies found a benefit for the drug — an unbelievable success rate no doubt aided by the fact that only 32 percent of company-funded trials are even published in the first place.

You can probably find the other 68 percent in the nearest shredder. (Read more about why drug studies can’t be trusted here.)

Put it all together, and you get what an editorial in BMJ calls a “culture of haphazard publication and incomplete data disclosure” that makes any true risks-benefits analysis “almost impossible.”

I’d say we’re way beyond “almost.”

The best way to protect your prostate is to keep it far away from doctors who want to screen it — and even further from the surgeons who make a living off prostate cancer procedures.

Not long ago, this was considered a rogue approach.

Today, it’s mainstream science — and another study confirms again that all the screenings in the world don’t save lives.

Simply put, the government-funded study of 76,000 men who were tracked for 13 years finds that annual PSA tests don’t make a bit of difference in determining who lives and who dies.

It’s not hard to see why: PSA tests can’t sort the rare, aggressive and deadly tumors from the ones you don’t need to worry about — and even when they do detect high-risk cancers, it’s too late.

As a result, men in both groups — those who were screened every year, and those who were not — died of the disease at the same rate, according to the study results published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

But don’t be fooled by the scare tactics: Most men who have prostate cancer live with it for years or even decades, and eventually die of something else entirely.

And until screenings came along, most of these men never even knew they had prostate cancer.

Ignorance was truly bliss.

Today, when men find out they have the disease, they panic and get treated for it — but if it doesn’t reduce the death rate, why bother even finding out in the first place?

That’s the bottom line here, and if you’re thinking “better safe than sorry,” think again. Prostate surgery won’t keep you safe… and it’ll almost certainly leave you sorry — sorry you ever agreed to surgery.

The procedure that’s been proven NOT to save your life can ruin it more than your doctors will ever let on. Men who wake up after prostate surgery often find they’ve lost all control “down there” and face long battles with incontinence and impotence.

Plenty of men never recover.

When you consider the decades you can live after a prostate cancer diagnosis — with or without surgery — that could add up to a quarter of your life or more, in diapers and unable to have sex.

Of course, you’ve probably heard commercials and seen ads for newer “robot” procedures that make it sound like they have fewer of these risks — but that’s just not reality.

Keep reading for the truth behind robot-assisted prostate surgeries.

Putting the toilet lid down isn’t just good manners — it could also save a life, and, no, I don’t mean from drowning.

British researchers recently conducted a series of tests on toilet seats — and before you dismiss this as a bit of wacky and unnecessary research, check out what they learned: Toilets can spread potentially deadly bacteria when the lid is up.

That’s because each time you flush, a cloud of tiny water particles rises up out of the toilet.

It’s a gross enough thought — but the researchers found that those water droplets can harbor Clostridium difficile (C. diff), a gut bacteria that can cause severe diarrhea, colitis, blood infections and more.

A series of flush tests at the Leeds Teaching Hospital found that the C.diff-contaminated toilet water can rise 10 inches out of the toilet and land on the seat — and up to 90 minutes later, the bacteria was still alive…and waiting for someone to sit there.

Now, this study is more than just a funny bit of research about bathrooms, because the one place where you might be most likely to encounter C.diff is also the one place where you’re most likely to be hurt by it: in a hospital.

C.diff is rapidly becoming a scourge of hospitals and nursing homes, spreading like wildfire and often resistant to medication when it does break out — especially because most of the patients who suffer a C.diff infection have already taken one or more antibiotics.

The drugs wipe out nearly all the bacteria in the stomach, even the good ones, leaving tough-as-nails C.diff as the only survivor. And because these patients are already sick, a C.diff infection could quickly turn deadly.

As a result, an estimated 28,000 people die of C.diff infections every year — and nearly all of them picked it up in a hospital or nursing home.

Why is this important — and what does this have to do with toilets? Because in many of these facilities, you can’t put the lid down even if you want to: The toilets don’t have them.

C.diff is notoriously tough to kill — but fortunately, it still has one natural enemy: bleach. If you or anyone you love is in a hospital or care facility, make sure the bathroom positively reeks of bleach.

And if it doesn’t, demand a cleaning crew and a bucket of bleach… especially on and around the toilet seat.