Sleep apnea can raise risk of death
Obstructive sleep apnea leads to daytime drowsiness and a higher rate of death for people with the condition. Advancements have been made in effective treatment.
Sometimes, snoring is a sign of obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that has been associated with an increased risk for high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke and diabetes. But two studies published Aug. 1 make it official: sleep apnea is deadly.
People with obstructive sleep apnea stop breathing during the night, when the soft tissue in the backs of their throats collapses and blocks their airways. These pauses usually last between 10 and 30 seconds, but can go on for up to one minute. People with the most severe forms of the disorder can stop breathing more than 30 times per hour.
"Your brain makes a choice between breathing and sleeping -- at first, the brain chooses sleeping, but then it wakes you briefly so you can catch your breath, " said Dr. Rafael Pelayo, a professor at Stanford School of Medicine and a physician in the university's Sleep Disorders Clinic.
The two new reports, published in the journal Sleep, have shown that after adjusting for other risk factors, people with severe, untreated obstructive sleep apnea were about four times more likely to die from all causes than those without the condition.
One study followed 1,522 adults from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study for 18 years, while the other tracked 380 adults in the Busselton Health Study in Western Australia for up to 14 years. Both studies used subjects who were drawn randomly from the community instead of relying on patients already seeking treatment at a sleep clinic for sleep apnea, which may skew the sample toward sicker patients.
When obstructive sleep apnea robs a patient of a good night's rest and causes daytime drowsiness, it can be a serious hazard to others as well as the patient. A 1999 report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the odds of an obstructive sleep apnea patient getting in a traffic accident are more than six times those of a person without the condition.
Memory loss and difficulty concentrating are common complaints of people with obstructive sleep apnea. A report out of UCLA published in June in the journal Neuroscience Letters demonstrates that people with the condition actually have tissue loss in brain regions that help store memories.
The researchers compared 43 people experiencing obstructive sleep apnea with 66 controls and found that brain structures called mammillary bodies were reduced in size by 20%, on average, in the group with obstructive sleep apnea. Though the researchers haven't shown this yet, they speculate that repeated drops in blood oxygen levels caused by interruptions in breathing lead to brain injury.
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