Here’s some strange news- a recent scientific study has suggested that the elderly may actually benefit if they develop Sleep Apnea.
This is the claim of Peretz Lavie, a world-renowned expert on sleep and sleep disorders. He’s got a list of qualifications and publications on the subject as long as your arm, and he’s also president of the Israel Institute of Technology to boot.
Dr Lavie, and his wife, Dr. Lena Lavie, have followed a group of around 600 senior citizens for a period of almost five years, and examined their incidence of sleep problems including hypoxia and Sleep Apnea, and studied the effect on mortality rates.
Their conclusion is that for the subjects studied, those who had Sleep Apnea actually had lower than average mortality rates! The explanation he provides for this is that the periodic lack of oxygen that Sleep Apnea creates, helps to stimulate the growth of extra arteries in the heart through a process known as Angiogenesis. This in turn can improve a person’s blood supply, and increase their ability to survive or avoid a heart attack.
So what does this mean? On the face of it, it seems a little confusing, however this is the way that science works- we don’t know the answer to something, so we study it, trying to ask intelligent questions as we do so, and we re-examine our initial hypotheses based on our findings. If what we thought turns out to be wrong, and is corroborated by others (which in this case it has, by an independent study conducted in Germany), then you accept what you find as the truth.
Then again, you also have to be careful not to take things too far. I don’t think anyone will be going out of their way to suggest radical new treatments to induce Sleep Apnea in the elderly any time soon! It’s worth mentioning, too, that these findings didn’t apply to the young, or the middle-aged.
The best evidence we have suggests that if you aren’t old yet, Sleep Apnea represents a significant risk to your long-term health, and is associated with, amongst other things, increased mortality rates. That hasn’t changed, and the need to do something about Sleep Apnea if you develop it is as strong as ever.
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