Do you know if you snor or not? Maybe you have a partner or a family member delivering the surprising (or not) messages, or maybe you have had sleepless nights who listen to the snoring of someone else. Snoring can often be a sign of obstructive sleep apnea, the most common sleep disorder in context 25 million US -growing. It leads to this Mayo clinic.
According to recent research, an apparently independent phenomenon could deteriorate this potentially dangerous sleep disorder: climate change. A new study in published in Natural communication found that warmer temperatures led to the participants to have a 45% higher probability that obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) had on a certain night.
“Overall, we were surprised by the size of the connection between the ambient temperature and the severity of the OSA,” said the main author Bastien Lechat at Flinders University Health and Medical Research Institute in Australia in the Press release.
This can not only have worrying effects on health, but also for the economy: OSA is associated with a significant decrease in productivity and absenteeism in the workplace. Since it becomes more common with increasing temperatures, the global economy could cost productivity of $ 30 billion and another $ 68 billion of worsened well-being.
The researchers analyzed the sleep data of 116,620 participants in 29 countries over 3.5 years with an OSA monitor of the food and drug authority in order to establish the connection between the daily ambient temperature and the nightly OSA status.
“Higher diagnosis and treatment rates will help us manage and reduce the adverse health problems caused by climate -drawn OSA,” said Co author Danny Eckert in the press release.
The health burden on obstructive sleep apnea and climate change
Since OSA is tightened by heating temperatures, this can lead to harmful effects on health. Untreated or severe cases of OSA can increase the risk of dementia, Parkinson’s disease, high blood pressure, cardiovascular diseases, anxiety and depression and even a Shorten your lifespan. People with OSA can also suffer from frequent tiredness and mood swings, who constantly disturbed that sleep was disturbed by breathing breathing that adhere to a deep, restorative sleep.
Bad sleep Is also connected with faster brain alternationReduced cognitive functions, deteriorated mental health, inflammation, cardiovascular diseases and a suppressed immune system.
Higher ambient temperatures also have Well established negative effects on health, including worsened intellectual well -being and overall worsened Quality of sleep and duration. Previous research shows that warmer temperatures increase the effects of OSA as a whole, since warmer temperatures lead to lighter sleep stages and more frequent disorders and awakening.
The economic burden of OSA
In the study, the researchers estimated that global warming in connection with OSA prevalence in 2023 was associated with a loss of 788,198 healthy years of life in 29 countries.
In view of the fact that OSA affects the mood and the energy level caused by a disturbed sleep, it is common for people to experience lower productivity and more frequent absenteeism at work. If the frequency and severity of the OSA continues to increase, this could be catastrophic for the global economy. In 2023, the researchers found that the increase in OSA in the 29 countries examined led to a further 25 million absence times, which led to an economic costs of $ 30 billion from the lost work.
Researchers warn that the study population is likely to underestimate the potential health and economic stress: all participants had a sleeping device and lived in highly developed countries with greater access to thermal interference such as air conditioning systems.
With the middle global temperatures, which are expected to increase by 2.1 ° C to 3.4 ° C, the effects of the heat are likely to deteriorate.
“Our results show that OSA load can double by 2100 due to increasing temperatures without major political measures to slow down global warming,” said Lechat.
“In the future, we would like to develop intervention studies, examine the strategies in order to reduce the effects of ambient temperatures on the severity of the sleep apnea and to examine the underlying physiological mechanisms that connect the temperature fluctuations with OSA heavy thread,” added Eckerert.
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