Participants in a long-term study who had coronary heart disease and sleep apnea had lower rates of recurrent cardiac events.
After adjusting for nearly a dozen potential confounders, the participants with sleep apnea were at 21% lower risk of recurrent events, defined as myocardial infarction or revascularizations (hazard ratio 0.79, 95% CI 0.65-0.97, per 10-point increase in baseline apnea/hypopnea index [AHI] value), with median 9.0 years of follow-up after enrollment, according to Neomi Shah, MD, MPH, of Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, N.Y.
At last follow-up, which extended to more than 4,000 days, about 20% of those with AHI values greater than 30 had experienced a recurrent event, compared with about 35% to 40% of those with lower AHI values, Shah and colleagues reported in a poster presented at SLEEP 2015, the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
