CPAP Therapy Helps Sleep Apnea Patients Live Longer
Continued CPAP use as directed increased patients’ survival rates over a three-year period, according to a ResMed-backed survey of French OSA patient data.
Using positive airway pressure therapy as directed can significantly increase sleep apnea patients’ chances of living longer, according to a late-breaking abstract presented this week at the virtual European Respiratory Society International Congress 2021 and supported by sleep therapy equipment maker ResMed.
The study, “CPAP Termination and All-Cause Mortality: a French Nationwide Database Analysis,” concluded that people with obstructive sleep apnea who continued PAP therapy were 39 percent more likely to survive than OSA patients who didn’t. Researchers observed over 176,000 people in France with sleep apnea over a three-year period.
The survival rate gap remained significant when accounting for patients’ ages, overall health, other pre-existing conditions, and causes of death, the study’s authors added.
“Treating sleep apnea with PAP therapy may help you live longer; that’s the key takeaway here for people with sleep apnea and their doctors,” said Adam Benjafield, a co-author of the study and ResMed vice president of Medical Affairs. “This finding underscores how critical it is to identify the hundreds of millions of people worldwide whose sleep apnea is undiagnosed and untreated.”
An estimated 936 million people worldwide have sleep apnea2 – including over 175 million Europeans – but over 80% remain undiagnosed.3
The study, known as the ALASKA study, was conducted in partnership with Professor Jean-Louis Pépin; the universities of Grenoble, San Diego, and Sydney; Sêmeia; and other researchers from ResMed’s industry-academia collaboration medXcloud.