Women suffer from sleep apnea too
11-11-2012
For some reason there is a prevailing idea that sleep apnea is largely a male problem, that could be caused in part because men are more commonly accused of snoring than women. However, the reality is that women suffer from sleep apnea. Sleep apnea affects a wide number of people, including young and healthy people, it is not limited to the old or obese, the infirm or sick. Sleep apnea is more widespread than many would believe, with up to 50 percent of adults suffering from it at some point in their lives, including women.
In a new study published in this August, researchers from Uppsala and Umeå University in Sweden analyzed 400 women between the ages of 20 and 70 years and they found that 50 percent of all the women participants aged 20 to 70 years had obstructive sleep apnea.
The same study also found that around 80 percent of women with hypertension and at least 84 percent of obese women suffer from sleep apnea. Of the obese women, 31 percent between age 55 and 70 had severe sleep apnea.
These are scary statistics and they mean that women need to be as wary of sleep apnea as men, just because women don’t snore as much, doesn’t mean they don’t have sleep apnea.
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