Re: Sleep apnea may increase risk of diabetes (EurekAlert!)
- From: Chris Malcolm <cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 21 May 2007 09:46:30 GMT
Ozgirl <are_we_there_yet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Frisbee?" <billLASTNAME@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Dr74i.3659$to.628@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<admin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in messageOSA
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ATS 2007, SAN FRANCISCO?"Researchers at the Yale University School of
Medicine have found that patients with obstructive sleep apnea are at
increased risk for developing of type II diabetes, independent of other
risk factors.
Well, duh. As an overweight recently diagnosed diabetic who has been
diagnosed with OSA ten years ago, how many people who have diabetes and
are NOT overweight? It's hard to find people with OSA who are notnot
overweight... I've been to the meetings and we're all fat :-) I realize
all diabetics are, but I'll bet that's the common symptom between the two.
It may be or not :) My ex is an anecdotal example. He was diagnosed with OSA
when fat, he lost weight and the OSA disappeared. Whenever he gained any
significant weight it came back.
About twenty years ago I started snoring a lot and waking up my
sleeping partner. I also suspected from the descriptions I got that I
was disturbing my own sleep with sleep apnea. I discovered that it was
weight related, i.e. the more weight I lost the less I snored. So one
of the reasons back then for keeping my weight down was to keep the
snoring and apnea down. In my case it wasn't a lot of weight -- all I
had to do was to move past the middle of what my doctor's chart
considered the normal healthy weight range for the snoring and
probable apnea to start.
He is now a type 2 diabetic.
As I aged it became harder and harder to keep my weight down. In
retrospect that was probably the unrecognised development of
metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes. At the time of diagnosis with
type 2 diabetes I had got near the top end of the normal healthy
weight range. It was by then much harder to lose weight, and if I
wasn't careful to limit my eating I put on weight very rapidly.
I'd been bringing all this to the attention of my doctors at regular
intervals for many years, but they all said it was "just age", and
since I wasn't yet technically speaking overweight they refused to
take my worries seriously that something was going wrong and getting
steadily worse. "You're getting older, it's natural" they said.
The Yale
people have probably found a connection and turned it into a OSA may cause
diabetes without any real proof other than a "connection". I am sure there
are obese people with OSA who will never get OSA just as there are thin
people with OSA, etc etc. Children with Down syndrome often have it.
Without a good understanding of the causal machinery involved a lot of
epidemiological medicine is just groping in the dark with
statistics. Unfortunately the current fashion for what they call
"evidence-based medicine" has misled a lot of doctors into believing
that epidemiological studies are so much more important than
developing an understanding of the causal machinery that that side of
medicine is getting too little attention and resources. A conclusive
epidemiological study should be seen as the start of the hunt, not
its end.
--
Chris Malcolm cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
.
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