Sleep Apnea And COVID-19: Good & Bad News

If you suffer sleep apnea, a new study from JAMA Network Open has some good—but mostly bad—news regarding Covid-19.

I don’t like to present bad news, but it necessary for you to know about this.

Fortunately, it’s quite easy to eliminate sleep apnea naturally, so the bad news doesn’t have to be bad forever.

What complicates the answer to this question is the relationship between sleep apnea and conditions that definitely worsen COVID-19 outcomes, like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. For example, if scientists find that sleep apnea sufferers have worse COVID-19 outcomes than other people do, is it because of their sleep apnea or because of their obesity and other risk factors?

In the first of two studies in JAMA Network Open, researchers recruited all patients that were tested for COVID in the Cleveland Clinic Health System in Ohio and Florida between March and November 2020.

Altogether, they found 5,402 COVID patients who had previously undergone a sleep study that measured the number of breathing pauses and their blood oxygen levels throughout the night. Of these, 1,935 tested positive for COVID.

These were their findings after trying to exclude the influence of obesity and other COVID risk factors:

1. Sleep apnea did not make it more likely that subjects would contract COVID. That’s the good news.

2. Those with COVID had more breathing pauses per hour than those without (16.2 versus 13.6) and spent a larger portion of sleep time with blood oxygen below 90% (1.8% versus 1.4%).

3. Sleep apnea sufferers were 31% more likely than healthy sleepers to be hospitalized or to die of COVID.

4. Sleep apnea sufferers were 39% more likely to suffer severe COVID, based on World Health Organization criteria.

Therefore, sleep apnea didn’t increase their risk of getting COVID, but once they were infected, it certainly increased their risk of being seriously sick or dying.

Fortunately, it’s easy to eliminate sleep apnea using the simple throat exercises explained here…