Treating Sleep Apnea Reduces Heart Disease Deaths

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) may find nighttime treatment with a pressurized breathing machine cumbersome, but it pays off: continuous positive airway pressure therapy -- CPAP, as it's called -- does lower the rate of heart-related deaths in such patients, researchers have shown.

People with OSA suffer frequent, short periods during sleep when they stop breathing. The condition is linked to high blood pressure and other heart conditions.

The current findings, Dr. Walter T. McNicholas told Reuters Health, "provide a strong basis for physicians to encourage compliance with CPAP in patients with OSA, particularly in severe cases, based on the strong likelihood that such patients, if untreated, are at substantially higher risk of cardiovascular complications,"

McNicholas, from St. Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin, and colleagues compared the outcomes of 107 patients with OSA who continued to receive CPAP therapy with 61 similar patients who had quit therapy, over a period of 7 years.

Significantly fewer patients who continued CPAP therapy died of cardiovascular causes (1.9 percent) than did patients who discontinued CPAP (14.8 percent), the team reports in the medical journal Chest.

There was also significantly more new heart-related disease in the untreated patients than in the CPAP-treated patients, the results indicate.

"OSA is a substantial contributing factor to cardiovascular disease, and cardiologists should be aware of this association, particularly since our data indicate substantial cardiovascular benefit from treatment of the disorder," McNicholas concluded.

SOURCE: Chest, June 2005.