How climate change could worsen a dangerous sleep condition and cost the global economy billions of dollars in lost productivity
Do you know if you are snoring or not? Perhaps you have a partner or a family member giving sudden news (or no), or maybe you had spent nights without sleeping to the snoring of another person. Snoring can often be a sign of sleep apnea, which is the most common sleep breathing disorder that can affect more than 25 million American adults. It makes people stop again and repeated breathing during their sleep, when the throat muscles relax and prevent the airway, according to the leadership of May.
It can be an apparently related phenomenon with the aggravation of this disorder that is likely to be dangerous to sleep, according to the recent research: climate change. A new study published in Nature Communications I found that the warmer temperatures caused a 45 % higher probability due to the presence of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) on a specific night.
“In general, we were surprised by the size of the relationship between the surrounding temperature and the intensity of OSA,” said the lead author Bastian Lekhtat at the Institute of Health and Medical Research at the University of Flinders in Australia.
This can have worrying effects not only on health, but also the economy: OSA is associated with a significant decrease in the productivity of the workplace and its absence, and since it is more prevalent with high temperatures, the global economy may cost $ 30 billion in lost productivity, and $ 68 billion of excessive luxury.
The researchers analyzed the 116,620 sleeping data in 29 countries over 3.5 years, using the OSA screen that was surveyed by the Food and Drug Administration to establish a link between the daily surrounding temperature and the nights of OSA night.
Danny Ecart, co -author of the press statement, said: “The rates of diagnostic and higher treatment will help us to manage and reduce the harmful health and productivity problems caused by the climate related to the climate.”
Health losses to stop breathing during sleep and climate change
As OSA exacerbates warming temperatures, this can lead to harmful health effects. Included or severe cases of OSA can increase the risk of dementia, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, anxiety and depression, and even shorten your life. People with OSA may also have frequent fatigue and mood, caused by constant sleep from interruptions that prevent stability in a deep sleep.
Weak sleep is also associated with aging in the brain faster, low cognitive performance, deteriorating mental health, infections, cardiovascular disease, and pent -up immune system.
The higher surrounding temperatures also have negative effects on health, including deteriorating mental well -being and the exacerbation of the quality and duration of sleep. Previous research indicates that the warmer temperatures amplify the effects of OSA, as the warmer temperatures lead to lighter sleep stages and more repeated disorders and waking up.
OSA’s economic burden
In the study, the researchers estimated that global global increases in the spread of OSA in 2023 were associated with a loss of 788198 health years in 29 countries.
Looking at how OSA affects the levels of mood and energy caused by disabled sleep, it is common for people to suffer from low productivity and the most common days at work. But if the frequency and intensity of OSA continues, this may be catastrophic for the global economy. In 2023, the researchers noted that the increase in OSA led to an additional 25 million absent days throughout the countries that were studied, which led to an economic cost of $ 30 billion in the missing work.
Researchers warn that the study residents probably reduce health and potential economy: all participants had a sleep tracking device and resided in very developed countries with increased access to heat extraction tools such as air conditioning, leaving less economic social groups with the greatest thermal burden represented.
With global temperatures expected to increase by 2.1 ° C to 3.4 degrees Celsius, the effects of heat are likely to worsen.
Lekhhat said: “The results we have reached highlighting that without a greater political procedure to slow the global warming phenomenon, OSA Burden may double by 2100 due to high temperatures.”
“Moving forward, we want to design intervention studies that explore strategies to reduce the effect of surrounding temperatures on the severity of sleep apnea as well as investigating the basic physiological mechanisms that bind temperature fluctuations severely OSA,” added EcKERT.
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2025-06-17 18:50:00
