Apnea May Link To Blood Pressure .........

Apnea May Link To Blood Pressure Taken from The Associated Press Article May 11, 2000 <p> http://www.discoveryhealth.com <p> Apnea - a disorder that interrupts people's breathing while they sleep - may be a cause of high blood pressure rather than something that simply accompanies it. <p> Researchers from the University of Wisconsin looked at more than 700 people for four to eight years. Some had sleep apnea; others did not. The worse their apnea was at the start of the study, the more likely they were to develop high blood pressure later on. <p> Since the apnea came first, this is the strongest evidence yet that apnea may be a cause or something that speeds the progress of high blood pressure, said Paul E. Peppard of the preventive medicine department. <p> "Doctors need to take sleep apnea seriously," said Peppard, whose study was reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. <p> A Johns Hopkins University study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested a similar connection. <p> Doctors do not know just how apnea might aggravate or cause high blood pressure. But Peppard said disturbed, fragmented sleep and reduced oxygen in the blood might put the sympathetic nervous system, which responds to stress and readies the body for action, on "high alert" all day. <p> Dr. Rose Marie Robertson, president-elect of the American Heart Association, said the study does not indicate cause and effect, but the connection is intriguing. <p> "I think the important thing about this article is that it will make doctors who see patients with sleep apnea be certain that they're measuring their blood pressure," she said. "Half of the 50 million people in this country who have high blood pressure do not know they have it. <p> About 12 million Americans have sleep apnea - their breathing stops several or dozens of times an hour, interrupting their sleep without their knowledge - according to the American Sleep Apnea Association. <p> People with sleep apnea often wake up unrested or feel sleepy during the day. Most people who have sleep apnea snore loudly. <p> "For years it's been a nuisance or a comical noise. Our mission is to make it clear that it's more than a nuisance and not so comical," Peppard said. <p> The study found that even mild apnea, with fewer than five sleep interruptions per hour, increased the likelihood of developing high blood pressure about 40 percent. Moderate apnea, with fewer than 15 interruptions an hour, doubled the chances, and severe apnea nearly tripled them. <p> And that was after statistical techniques were used to weed out other factors related to high blood pressure, such as age, weight or smoking. <p> Open divided proximal RNY 12/8/99: Beginning weight 367 as of last week 260. ;-) For more information and links and recipes please visit my profile.

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