Sleep Apnea is a clinical condition related to problematic breathing during the course of sleep. Patient faces epochs of less or completely vanished respiratory cycles for more then 15-20 seconds. Traditional methods to detect the ailments are troublesome both in terms of finance and physical routine. This study focuses the effects of sleep apnea on heart rate. MIT-BIH sleep apnea database has been deployed. RR intervals have been derived from ECG data and Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform (DWPT) has been employed to highlight the differences in normal and abnormal cases. An overall accuracy of 85 was achieved by this method. © 2011 IEEE.