Study Details Cigarette Smoking's Negative Affects on Sleep

Coronary artery disease and lung cancer is well established, the role cigarette smoking plays in obstructive sleep apnea remains unsettled. New research that will be presented at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies' Annual Meeting in Philadelphia this June finds that cigarette smoking has detrimental affects on sleep.

Researchers found that cigarette smoking causes difficulty initiating and maintaining sleep as well as daytime sleepiness. Some of these affects are mediated via nicotine withdrawal. Interestingly, some investigators studied the use of nicotine gums or patches to treat obstructive sleep apnea with no encouraging results.

In this study, researchers analyzed 327 patients referred to the sleep lab at Kings County Hospital Center at Brooklyn from 01/02 - 10/03. They categorized the total population as well as each race/ethnicity separately into smokers and non-smokers to examine if there is any significant difference in the prevalence of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) among any of the groups.

Results concluded though cigarette smoking may have detrimental affects on sleep and nocturnal oxygen desaturation, by itself, it is not a predictor of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. No studies addressed whether the role cigarette smoking plays in OSA if any is dependant on race/ethnicity.

Studies mostly conducted in the United States concluded that cigarette smoking is a predictor of obstructive sleep apnea and that it increases the severity of nocturnal oxygen desaturation. The larger of the two studies which did not find cigarette smoking to be an independent risk factor for OSA was conducted in Canada and the other one in Spain.