A meta-analysis questions the effect of PAP therapy on cardiovascular problems in patients with sleep apnea, according to Medscape.
“While sleep apnea is clearly associated in observational studies with risks of cardiovascular disease, it doesn’t seem as if those risks can be reversed by treating people with PAP,” coauthor Dr Bruce Neal, the George Institute for Global Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, said in an interview.
“Whether that’s because our treatment method with PAP isn’t very good or whether the association that we see in the observational studies is being driven by something else isn’t really clear to us,” Neal said.
The results were published online July 11, 2017 in JAMA.
“I guess the key take home for clinicians is that PAP is a great treatment for managing symptoms such as sleepiness, but it’s clearly not an effective treatment for preventing serious vascular complications associated with sleep apnea,” he said.
Read the rest at www.medscape.com
I usually trust JAMA, but this is truly ‘fake news.’ Anyone who has ever actually observed a sleep study being performed on a patient with arrhythmias then watched as PAP significantly improved them can attest to how untrue this article is. Perhaps the authors could actually observe sleep studies instead of retrospectively review studies with a bias.