Do you know if you snore or not? Maybe you had a partner or family member deliver the surprising (or not) news, or perhaps you have had sleepless nights listening to someone else’s snores. Snoring can often be a sign of obstructive sleep apnea, the most common sleep-related breathing disorder estimated to impact over 25 million U.S. adults. It causes people to repeatedly stop and start breathing while they sleep, when the throat muscles relax and block the airway, according to the Mayo Clinic.
A seemingly unrelated phenomenon could be worsening this potentially dangerous sleep disorder, according to recent research: climate change. A new study published in Nature Communications found that warmer temperatures caused participants to have a 45% higher probability of having obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) on a given night.
“Overall, we were surprised by the magnitude of the association between ambient temperature and OSA severity,” said lead author Bastien Lechat at Flinders University Health and Medical Research Institute in Australia in the press release.
That can have not only worrying implications for health, but also the economy: OSA is associated with significant decreases in workplace productivity and absenteeism, and as it becomes more prevalent with rising temperatures, that could cost the global economy $30 billion in lost productivity, and another $68 billion from worsened well-being.
Researchers analyzed sleep data of 116,620 participants across 29 countries over 3.5 years, using a Food and Drug Administration-cleared OSA monitor to establish the link between daily ambient temperature and nightly OSA status.
“Higher rates of diagnosis and treatment will help us to manage and reduce the adverse health and productivity issues caused by climate related OSA,” coauthor Danny Eckert said in the press release.
The health toll of obstructive sleep apnea and climate change
As OSA is exacerbated by warming temperatures, that can lead to detrimental health impacts. Untreated or severe cases of OSA can increase the risk of dementia, Parkinson’s disease, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, anxiety and depression, and even a shorten your lifespan. People with OSA may also suffer from frequent fatigue and mood swings, caused by continually disrupted sleep from breathing interruptions that inhibits settling into a deep, restorative sleep.
Poor sleep is also linked to faster brain aging, decreased cognitive functioning, worsened mental health, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, and a suppressed immune system.
Higher ambient temperatures also have well-established negative effects on health, including worsened mental well-being and overall worsened sleep quality and duration. Previous research shows that warmer temperatures overall magnify the impacts of OSA, as warmer temperatures lead to lighter sleep stages and more frequent disruptions and awakenings.
The economic burden of OSA
In the study, researchers estimated that the global warming-related increases in OSA prevalence in 2023 was associated with a loss of 788,198 healthy life years in 29 countries.
Given how OSA impacts mood and energy levels caused by disrupted sleep, it’s common that people experience lower productivity and more frequent missed days at work. But if OSA frequency and severity continues to increase, that could be catastrophic for the global economy. In 2023, researchers observed that the increase in OSA led to an additional 25 million absenteeism days across the 29 studied countries, leading to an economic cost of $30 billion from the lost labor.
Researchers caution that the study population likely underestimates the potential health and economic burden: All participants owned a sleep tracking device and resided in highly developed countries with greater access to heat-mitigating tools like air conditioning, leaving lower socioeconomic groups with the greatest heat burden underrepresented.
With the mean global temperatures projected to increase by 2.1°C to 3.4 °C, the impacts of heat are likely to worsen.
“Our findings highlight that without greater policy action to slow global warming, OSA burden may double by 2100 due to rising temperatures,” Lechat said.
“Going forward, we want to design intervention studies that explore strategies to reduce the impact of ambient temperatures on sleep apnea severity as well as investigate the underlying physiological mechanisms that connect temperature fluctuations to OSA severity,” Eckert added.
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