Sleep Apnea

Positive airway pressure even helps patients who fail to use the treatment as prescribed, study finds.

Positive airway pressure, which is used to treat obstructive sleep apnea, may also help ease symptoms of depression among people with the sleep-related breathing disorder, a new study suggests.

Although depression is common among people with sleep apnea, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic Sleep Disorders Center found that patients who used positive airway pressure therapy had fewer depressive symptoms — even if they didn’t follow the ...

Millions don’t know they have the airway disorder, experts say.

Millions of Americans plod through each day exhausted. Not because they’re working too hard, over-exercising or not taking enough vitamins.

The real reason, experts say, is because they unknowingly have a sleep disorder.

As many as 18 million Americans have obstructive sleep apnea, according to the National Sleep Foundation. But researchers estimate that as many as 90 percent of them don’t know they have it.

Sleep apnea causes people’s airways to become blocked while ...

Treatment for kids’ sleep apnea shown to improve attention span.

Obstructive sleep apnea in children produces chemical changes in brain areas associated with learning, memory, and executive function, a researcher said here.

Luckily, treatment for the sleep apnea appears to reverse many of those brain changes, Ann Halbower, MD, of Children’s Hospital Sleep Center in Denver, said here at the annual meeting of the American Thoracic Society.

A small study found that the normalization of the brain chemistry resulting from treatment was associated ...

Cancer compensates, spreads in search for oxygen, researcher suggests.

Sleep apnea has already been linked to a host of adverse health problems, such as high blood pressure and heart disease. Now, new research suggests that in people who already have cancer, the sleep disorder may raise their risk of dying from cancer.

People with the most severe sleep apnea — those who have 30 or more episodes of low or no oxygen in an hour of sleep — had almost five times ...

Nighttime breathing disorder might alter heart’s function, but CPAP mask therapy seems to help.

A nightly breathing treatment may not only help people with obstructive sleep apnea sleep better, it might also lower their risk of heart failure, a new study finds.

Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when breathing is interrupted throughout nighttime sleep. With the new study, a team of British researchers believe their findings could have a significant impact on the estimated 18 million Americans with some form of the condition.

“Sleep ...

Other research also suggests rapid memory loss may be linked to a fatal brain attack.

Sleep apnea, the disorder marked by abnormal pauses in breathing during sleep, is already known to boost the risk of stroke. Now, a new study links sleep apnea to so-called silent strokes, in which there is tissue death in the brain without symptoms.

In another new study, researchers found that rapid memory loss before a stroke boosts the risk of the stroke being fatal.

Both studies are slated ...

There are several risk factors associated with obstructive sleep apnea that are long-standing and well known. They include lifestyle and health factors such as obesity or excess body weight, high-blood pressure, and alcohol and tobacco use, as well as genetic and demographic factors such as family history of the disease, being older, and being male. Now, thanks to new research, we may have a new OSA risk factor to add to this list: asthma.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin investigated ...

Obesity has long been considered one of the most important risk factors for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in adults. In particular, visceral fat—a type of fat that collects in the abdomen—is increasingly regarded as a particularly significant risk factor for sleep apnea. Visceral fat in the abdomen is located within the abdominal cavity, around the body’s organs. Visceral fat itself is considered an important risk factor for a number of serious medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Although both ...

It is unknown if respiratory-related leg movements are just a marker of more severe obstructive respiratory events or whether the leg movements per se confer risk of cardiovascular disease.

Respiratory events that trigger leg movements predicted cardiovascular disease in older men with obstructive sleep apnea, researchers reported here.

After adjusting for clinic site, age, body mass index, and race, respiratory-related leg movements were associated with a 58 percent increased risk of incident cardiovascular disease in older men, according to Sayaka Aritake, PhD, ...

Patients with obstructive sleep apnea might also be at a higher risk for the often fatal condition known as sudden cardiac death, according to a new study.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) takes a person’s breath away throughout the night, but the corresponding increased risk of sudden cardiac death shows that it might also take someone’s breath away forever, according to a study from the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The largest study of its kind looked at 10,701 patients from ...