This is the kind of research that might be easy to make light of: “a fat old man snoring” pretty much sums up what most of us imagine sleep apnea looks like. But it’s serious: a new study in Diabetes Care found that the disorder is widely undiagnosed among obese individuals with type 2 diabetes: nearly 87 percent of participants reported symptoms, but were never diagnosed.
“Doctors who have obese patients with type 2 diabetes need to be aware of the possibility of sleep apnea, even if no symptoms are present, especially in cases where the patient has a high BMI or waist circumference,” said Gary Foster,the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University.
Currently, more than half of obese or overweight individuals have diabetes, the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.
Other authors were Kelley Borradaile (Temple); Mark Sanders, Anne Newman and David Kelley, (University of Pittsburgh); Richard Millman and Rena Wing (Brown University); Garry Zammit (Clinilabs); Thomas Wadden, Valerie Darcey and Samuel Kuna, (University of Pennsylvania); F. Xavier Pi SUnyer (Columbia University); and the Sleep AHEAD Research Group. Funding was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Foster, G., Sanders, M., Millman, R., Zammit, G., Borradaile, K., Newman, A., Wadden, T., Kelley, D., Wing, R., Pi Sunyer, F., Darcey, V., Kuna, S., & , . (2009). Obstructive Sleep Apnea Among Obese Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Diabetes Care, 32 (6), 1017-1019 DOI: 10.2337/dc08-1776
Paul Statt Communications 