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Re: Apnea and blood pressure


Posted by Brian in Columbus, GA on April 18, 2000 at 19:47:15:

In Reply to: Apnea and blood pressure posted by Bryan on April 18, 2000 at 14:23:20:

Thanks for posting this link. A number of us had a discussion of this report earlier in this forum, but I don't think any of us had actually seen the article. An interesting quote from the article is:

The study showed an increasing correlation between hypertension and severity of the apnea in all participants, regardless of age, sex, race or weight. But even moderate levels of sleep apnea raised the likelihood of hypertension, a major risk factor in cardiovascular disease.

I was able to track down the original article in JAMA. It can be accessed at:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v283n14/full/joc91797.html

The main points of the article are that severity of sleep apnea is correlated directly with high blood pressure even after things like age, weight, neck circumference, sex, and race have been accounted for. In other words, the correlation between sleep apnea and high blood pressure cannot be attributed to being overweight alone (although that certainly contributes as well). They have used some fancy statistics to pick apart various contributors to high blood pressure.

Others have come to similar conclusions previously, but these studies were based either on self-reported snoring as an indicator of apnea or included only a small number of patients in a clinical setting. The new study indicates that the apnea/hypopnea index (AHI) and low blood oxygen saturation are well correlated with blood pressure, and that arousal index and self-reported snoring are weakly correlated to blood pressure. This is confusing to me because I thought that AHI and RDI were the same thing and that both were the same as the arousal index. Does anyone know what the differences are?

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