Sleep Apnea and Cardiovascular Disease - Death Rate Triples for Sleep Apnea Patients

Some disturbing discoveries have surfaced, while conducting an ongoing research on the sleep apnea related issues. The study is spread over a span of 18 years on common people explains that chronic sufferers of sleep apnea have a three-fold death rate as compared to people having no sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is a state of frequent occurrences of breathing halts throughout sleeping is calculated by the quantity of complete or incomplete breaks in the breathing process every hour. In a report of August, SLEEP issue, the research personals discovered that the death risk increases with the number of increasing breath breaks.

This result from the study is derived by Mr. Terry Young, who is a PhD in epidemiology in the Madison University of Wisconsin.

The professor Young stated that they have been doing the research on sleep apnea side effects in the University of Wisconsin for over 10 years and have found relations between several diseases such as depression, stroke, hypertension and sleep apnea.

The professor stated that regardless of the above research, the new discoveries show alarming and grave wellbeing risks associated with sleep apnea, according to which chronic sleep apnea can lead to a heart failure.

He continued that the number of deaths due to heart failure were high in untreated serious sleep apnea patients being reported. Further, it has been reported in the research spread over the span of more than 18 years that the sufferers who had breathing halts more than 30 times in an hour were more prone to cardiovascular deaths in comparison to less than 5 breathing pauses sufferers.

On the contrary, the positive thing is that sufferers, who were using CPAP machine performed far better survival rate. Whereas, the risk of death due to heart failure shot from three to five times in the patients who were neglecting the use of CPAP therapy.

According to the March 2008 research, the death reports of the state were observed and it came out that 19% (12 people) having serious sleep apnea died as compared to the death of 4% (46 people) having no sleep apnea symptoms.

Later on, the contributors having severe apnea were reached out and health threats associated with the condition were explained to them and they were suggested to seek the professional treatment without any further delay. In spite of warning, majority of people fell short of receiving the professional treatment for their syndrome.

Additionally, their key therapists might have been ignorant, of the requirement for extra assessment of their condition of breathing breaks, infrequent and loud snoring.

Dr. Ruth Benca, M.D. “Wisconsin Sleep Clinic” stated that people, who had been taking sleep apnea and snoring lightly, would be shocked by the latest findings.

"The silver lining is that treatment for sleep apnea seems to help decrease the risk of death and serious complications."

Nevertheless, the good thing is that cardiovascular mortality and severe consequences of sleep apnea can be minimized by the proper treatment.