How Sleep Apnea Affects AFib

Today we're gonna be talking about sleep apnea and how sleep apnea can affect a person's atrial fibrillation. So first of all what is sleep apnea? Sleep apnea is a sleep related disease where people basically stop breathing while they're sleeping. And during those periods which can last anywhere from just a few seconds to 15, 30 seconds, patient's oxygen levels also go down there in that period when they stop breathing. And people who have sleep apnea, they can actually stop breathing many times throughout the night.

15, 20, 50 times. It can happen many times where a patient stopped breathing overnight. Sleep apnea is usually diagnosed with a sleep study. Usually we'll go to a facility, have your sleeping monitor with a monitor to your sleeping... Your breathing pattern and also your oxygen levels to see if you have sleep apnea. So what is the association between sleep apnea and AFib? So there have been studies that have looked at this association and it's been shown that people who have sleep apnea are two to four fold more likely to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. So there is certainly an association between the two. And anybody who's been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, undergoing evaluation for sleep apnea with a sleep study is certainly a very important screening tool for anybody who is diagnosed with atrial fibrillation.

Now, we know that there's an association between the two but does treating sleep apnea also help improve a person's AFib? And the answer to that is yes. There have been studies that have shown that managing sleep apnea can also help improve a person's AFib. There have been studies that have shown that managing sleep apnea using what's called CPAP. Where they put a heavy oxygen mask while a patient is breathing to help facilitate their breathing can improve a person's AFib by about 42% with a significant reduction of a model of person's AFib when the sleep apnea is being properly treated.

In addition, patients who have sleep apnea but are being properly treated with the CPAP machine have higher success rates with procedures such as cardioversions or ablations and are like more likely to have better success when their sleep apnea is properly treated. So there's certainly an association between the two but properly treating sleep apnea with the CPAP machine can make significant improvements for a person's atrial fibrillation. 

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