Sleep apnea symptoms can be similar to symptoms of lots of other medical conditions, or may be ignored and chalked up to things like work stress, having a busy schedule, or having a lot going on with the family. But doctors urge people not to overlook or disregard symptoms.
If it’s not sleep apnea, your doctor may be able to help correctly diagnose another medical problem if there is one — or help you find ways to deal with stressors in your life that cause you to feel the way you do.
And if it is sleep apnea, your doctor can help you diagnose the problem and get treatmentbefore the condition starts causing complications — and before the sleepiness and fatigue associated with sleep apnea lead to an accident that could harm you or others.
“When sleep apnea is untreated, an individual has a 2.5 times increased risk of having a motor vehicle accident,” says James Rowley, MD, a pulmonologist and sleep medicine specialist at Detroit Medical Center and a member of the AASM’s board of directors.“It’s the equivalent of driving drunk.” (That risk level is based on data published in the journal Sleep.)
Truck drivers are known to be at a particularly high risk for sleep apnea. In part that’s because certain factors that characterize a high number of truck drivers, such as being middle-aged, male, and obese, are also risk factors for sleep apnea, according to research.
A separate review in the journal Sleep specifically looked at truck drivers’ accident risk. Those with sleep apnea who didn’t follow their recommended treatments were 5 times more likely to crash than drivers without sleep apnea.
It’s a serious problem, many sleep medicine experts, public health officials, and others have said, because commercial automobile accidents tend more often to be fatal or serious than noncommercial automobile accidents, according to another study.
“Truck drivers with untreated obstructive sleep apnea are at dramatically greater risk of serious, preventable truck crashes, consistent with the greatly increased risk of motor vehicle crashes among automobile drivers with untreated obstructive sleep apnea,” said one of the study’s coauthors, Charles A. Czeisler, PhD, MD, the director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, in a press release about the study.
Despite these risks, the current guidelines for screening truck drivers and other commercial vehicle operators are lax. In a letter to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the AASM urged the two agencies to improve current guidelines and sleep apnea screening procedures for drivers and other personnel who hold positions that can affect public safety in highway and rail transportation. The Federal Aviation Administration has in recent years implemented requirements to screen airline pilots for sleep apnea.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) does not recommend screening for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in asymptomatic adults, citing insufficient evidence to do so — although the organization notes that it is a fully independent group and its recommendations do not reflect any type of official U.S. government guidelines.
For its part, the AASM recommends screening all patients who have a high risk for OSA even if they don’t report any sleep-related symptoms. It advises primary care providers to identify patients who have a high risk for OSA (such as people who have type 2 diabetes, obesity, or hypertension) and screen them for OSA, not only to improve the quality of life and health outcomes for those individuals, but also to benefit the public. AASM noted that diagnosing and treating every patient in the United States who has OSA could save an estimated $100 billion a year.
By skyforbes 