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Clinical InvestigationsEvening-to-Morning Blood Pressure Variations in Snoring Patients with and without Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Section snippets
Patients
This report is a part of an ongoing prospective study dealing with various clinical aspects of sleep apnea syndrome. Up to October 1990, there were 1,201 patients entered into the computer data base at the sleep clinic at St. Michaels Hospital, Toronto. Six hundred eleven of them satisfied the following criteria: (1) all were referred because of suspected sleep apnea; (2) all presented with snoring as their main complaint; (3) none had a history of hypertension; (4) none was receiving
RESULTS
Table 1 shows the anthropometric characteristics and sleep, snoring, and blood pressure data for the entire set of 611 patients, which consisted of 444 male and 167 female subjects.
Univariate regression analysis revealed that morning and evening mean arterial blood pressures correlated significantly (p<0.05) with age, BMI, AHI, SI, dBmax, and awake, lowest, and mean nocturnal oxygen saturations. However, not all of these variables are independent; for example, lowest nocturnal oxygen saturation
DISCUSSION
This study shows that patients with significant sleep apnea and oxygen desaturation do not show the expected morning decline in blood pressure. However, it appears that age and weight, rather than sleep apnea and the severity of oxygen desaturation, are major correlates of morning blood pressure.
Although the evening-to-morning changes in blood pressure found in this study are small, it would be incorrect to entirely dismiss the influence of sleep apnea and oxygen desaturation on blood pressure
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