14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)-supported study, it would appear that severe sleep apnea increases the risk of death in middle-aged citizens, and especially in males. This is the first landmark study to prove that serious scientific connections exist between the medical condition and death. In sleep apnea, the upper airways narrow during sleep, and can, at times, become entirely blocked, causing sufferers to die from suffocation.
The report reveals that patients suffering from the fairly common disorder were exposed to a 40 percent higher risk of death than people who did not have the condition, but were in the same age range, e! Science News reports. Most at risk during the study was the group of males between the ages of 40 and 70. They were more likely to die than healthy individuals, either from suffocation, or from related heart problems. The paper accompanying the research is published in the August 18th issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine.
In charge of the study were researchers from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), who surveyed more than 6,000 men and women aged 40 or older. Participants were either healthy, or suffered from mild, medium or severe sleep apnea. At the end of the eight-year study, patients who suffered from severe sleep apnea proved to be one and one-half times more likely to die than healthy people in the control group. Factors such as age, gender, race, or weight were found to have no statistically significant influence on the final outcome.
According to official US data, more than 12 million adults in America suffer from some form of sleep apnea. The vast majority of these people does not even know it suffers from the disease, and it is not diagnosed or treated. When cases are discovered, the most common forms of treatment include lifestyle changes, mouthpieces, surgery, and breathing devices (continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP). The SHHS experts say that more randomized studies on people receiving a treatment are needed, in order to accurately determine if any of them actually lowers the risk of death for patients suffering from severe sleep apnea.