The Effects of Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Its Intervention on Coronary Heart Disease

Overview

Obstructive sleep apnea(OSA) is an important identifiable cause of hypertension. Previous study has suggested that OSA significantly increases cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, especially in patients with pre-existing cardiovascular disease.The standardized treatment of moderate/severe OSA is continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). Most of short-term trials indicated that CPAP treatment reduced BP in patients with OSA. But relevant studies have a relative short duration with only but few more than one year. In our opinion, they are not sufficient to detect the real effect of CPAP on reduction in BP. Besides, the impact of OSA on metabolic disorder is still unclear.We hypothesized that long-term CPAP treatment could reduce blood pressure and improve metabolic disorder in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD)and OSA.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common disorder characterized by repetitive partial (hypopnea) or complete (apnea) occlusion of the upper airway during sleep caused by collapse of the pharyngeal airway, resulting in sleep fragmentation and oxyhemoglobin desaturation. Kiely and colleague's study showed that over 20% of hypertensive patients exhibit OSA, whereas prevalence of hypertension in the setting of OSA exceeds 50%. One study confirmed that OSA is an important identifiable cause of hypertension. OSA is considered as one of the most common risk factors of resistant hypertension. Previous study has suggested that OSA significantly increases cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, especially in patients with pre-existing cardiovascular disease. Several studies confirmed that CPAP reduced systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) in patients with OSA. Additionally, some papers reported that there was a protective effect of CPAP therapy against death from cardiovascular disease in patients with severe OSA. Other researches regarding the antihypertensive effect of CPAP therapy, however, showed that CPAP had no antihypertensive effect. But relevant studies have a relative short duration with only but few more than one year. In our opinion, they are not sufficient to detect the real effect of CPAP on reduction in BP. According to our knowledge, there is no report about long-term effect of CPAP on BP in hypertensive patients with coronary revascularization (CRV) and OSA under conventional antihypertensive medications. Therefore, we conducted a long-term, prospective controlled study to investigate the effects of CPAP on BP, metabolic disorder, clinical symptoms, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events in patients with CHD and OSA on conventional treatment.