Herbal Health Spot

Obese people with sleep apnea may triple the chances of eliminating their sleep problems by losing weight, claims a new study. More than just loud snoring, sleep apnea can lead to high blood pressure, stroke, cardiovascular disease and a poor quality of life.

“Existing research has been limited by a number of factors, so there are very few studies that show whether the recommended amount of weight loss – about 10 percent – is enough to sufficiently improve sleep apnea,” said Gary Foster, director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education. Foster and colleagues from six other universities recently completed the largest randomized study on the effects of weight loss on sleep apnea in patients with type 2 diabetes.

They found that among patients with severe sleep apnea, those who lost the recommended weight were three times more likely to nearly eliminate the number of sleep apnea episodes compared to those who did not lose weight. The study has been published in the Sept. 28 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The new study, called Sleep AHEAD, looked at 264 obese patients with type 2 diabetes already enrolled in the Look AHEAD trial, an ongoing 16-site study investigating the long-term health impact of an intensive lifestyle intervention in 5,145 overweight or obese adults with type 2 diabetes. Participants were between 45 and 75 years old.

The 264 participants were broken into two randomized groups: the first received a group behavioral weight loss program developed especially for obese patients with type 2 diabetes, portion-controlled diets, and a prescribed exercise regimen of 175 minutes per week. The second attended three group informational sessions over a one-year period that focused on diabetes management through diet, physical activity and social support.

After one year, members of the first group lost an average of 24 pounds. More than three times as many participants in this group had complete remission of their sleep apnea (13.6 percent compared to 3.5 percent), and also had about half the instances of severe sleep apnea as the second group. Further, participants in the second group only lost about a pound, and saw significant worsening of their sleep apnea, which suggested to Foster and his team that without treatment, the disorder can progress rapidly.

“These results show that doctors as well as patients can expect a significant improvement in their sleep apnea with weight loss,” said Foster, the study’’s lead author. “And a reduction in sleep apnea has a number of benefits for overall health and well-being,” the expert added.

A new study has found that individuals suffering from asthma fare much better when they have a stronger educational background. According to researchers, having less than 12 years of formal schooling is associated with worse asthma symptoms.

Drs. Kim Lavoie and Simon Bacon from the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Canada, worked with a team of researchers to study asthma severity in a group of 871 adult patients. “Lower educational achievement was associated with worse asthma control, greater emergency health service use, and worse asthma self-efficacy,” they said.

“Patients with less than 12 years of education were 55 percent more likely to report an asthma-related emergency health service visit in the last year,” they stated. The researchers suggest that lower education is often a marker of lower socio-economic status generally, and that this may explain their results.

At the individual level, poorer people may have higher exposures to indoor allergens, such as cockroaches, tobacco smoke and mould, and outdoor urban pollution. “Although this link between socio-economic status and asthma is well established in children, this is the first study to investigate it in an adult population in Canada,” Lavoie said.

“It is noteworthy that patients with less education were more likely to exhibit poor health behaviours that may exacerbate asthma, including smoking and being overweight,” she added. Lavoie and her colleagues hope that once all the mechanisms of the poverty-asthma relationship have been identified, interventions can be developed to improve asthma outcomes in these patients. The research has been published in BioMed Central’’s open access journal Respiratory Research.