WASHINGTON One-third of people with epilepsy may also suffer from sleep apnea, a disorder that causes people to stop breathing on and off while they sleep, scientists said this week.
A team at the University of Michigan found that 13 out of 39 people with epilepsy they studied also had sleep apnea which made them wonder whether the patients were having little seizures while they slept.
"We found that patients who had seizures during the night had more sleep apneas, but this is a chicken in the egg thing," Beth Malow of the Michael Aldrich Sleep Disorder Laboratory at the University of Michigan said in a telephone interview.
"We don't know if the seizures are causing the apnea or whether the apnea is causing the seizures." Of the 13 people affected by the sleep disorder, seven stopped breathing five to 10 times per hour for at least 10 seconds, another five suffered up to 20 apneas an hour and one man's breathing stopped more than 30 times per hour, the researchers reported in the October issue of the journal Neurology.
They found that men with epilepsy are two to four times more likely than women to suffer from sleep apnea.
Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain in which brain cells misfire, causing convulsive seizures and sometimes loss of consciousness.
It can affect people of any age and can be caused by genetic defects, brain injury or strokes.
Malow's findings echoed a 1993 study by Terry Young of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, which found that 24 percent of men and 9 percent of women with epilepsy suffered at least five apneas an hour in their sleep.
Malow's team studied people with epilepsy who did not know they had sleep apnea.
They started out trying to understand how the patients' sleep patterns might be changed by epilepsy surgery. "We weren't looking for sleep apnea," she said. "We were studying them to make sure that we knew what their sleep was like." Sleep apnea can cause high blood pressure, heart disease and strokes. At best, it is annoying and makes people tired.
"The big problem with sleep apnea is that it disrupts sleep so much that what it's doing is not giving people the deep sleep they need," Malow said.
"So they end up spending most of the night in incredibly light sleep. It's almost like staying up all night and depriving yourself." The most common and effective treatment for sleep apnea is called continuous positive airway pressure, supplied by a mask the patient wears at night to force a steady stream of air up the nose. Oral appliances are also used to pull the jaw forward, opening space at the back of the throat.
(Reuter)