Sleep apnea syndrome — in which sufferers stop breathing momentarily many times during the night — has for years been regarded as a major risk factor for clogging of the coronary arteries and other heart diseases.
But now, Technion– Israel Institute of Technology President Dr. Peretz Lavie (a psychologist and one of Israel’s leading sleep medicine experts) and his wife, fellow researcher and cell biologist Dr. Lena Lavie, have found that in elderly people, moderate apnea may in fact extend their lives rather than shorten it.
The Lavies’ re-search, based on the study of 611 individuals with a mean age of 70 and a follow-up period of about five years, recently was published in the Journal of Sleep Research of the European Sleep Research Society. The reasoning has been confirmed separately by German researchers at Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf, who published their findings in the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Peretz Lavie has published more than 340 scientific articles and eight books in the field of sleep research, including “The Enchanted World of Sleep,” which is suited for the layman and translated into 15 languages. His wife, a senior researcher at Technion, has collaborated with him on sleep research focusing on understanding the cellular and biochemical impacts of the breathing cessations.
Many sleep apnea patients go to bed at night connected to a continuous positive airway pressure device, which is not comfortable but provides pressurized air. This does not cure sleep apnea but can reduce the complications. Intermittent hypoxia — the lack of adequate oxygen — initiates a cascade of negative events.
But surprisingly, the new research found that in contrast to young and middle-age patients, who showed significantly higher mortality than their counterparts in the general population, elderly patients with mild or moderate apnea showed significantly lower mortality than in the general population.
The researchers suggest that the hearts of elderly sleep apnea patients get blood from a larger number of arteries than do the hearts of patients without sleep apnea. The arteries (called collaterals) develop by angiogenesis due to the lack of oxygen supply.
This additional blood supply protects them if they suffer a heart attack, the Lavies write.
Dr. Stephan Steiner and his colleagues from the cardiology department in Heinrich Heine University reported data that provided strong support for the Lavies’ hypothesis.
Steiner and his colleagues compared the number and size of the heart collaterals in patients with and without sleep apnea. They reported that patients with sleep apnea had significantly more collaterals than patients without sleep apnea, even though there were no differences between the groups in age, weight, heart condition or use of medication.
“If confirmed, these findings may have important clinical implications regarding treatment of the syndrome,” the Lavies wrote. “Moreover, such findings — if combined with individual gene analysis — may provide new treatment strategies for cardiovascular protection.”