Chest
Volume 101, Issue 2, February 1992, Pages 345-349
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Clinical Investigations
Sleep-Disordered Breathing in the Healthy Elderly: Clinically Significant?

https://doi.org/10.1378/chest.101.2.345Get rights and content

We evaluated sleep/wake, medical, and psychological parameters in a cohort of healthy men and women between 50 and SO years of age. Consistent with previous investigations of sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) in older persons, nocturnal breathing disturbances were quite common in our normal-aged subjects, with more than 15 percent experiencing five or more SDB events per hour of sleep. However, when SDB indices were correlated with comprehensive measures of daytime functioning, the number of statistically significant relationships was at or below expectations from chance alone. Additionally, comparison of high-SDB subjects (AHI ≥5) with low-SDB subjects (AHI <5) failed to reveal reliable differences on measures of daytime functioning. We conclude that SDB occurring in otherwise healthy older persons is not a cause for immediate concern, although longitudinal studies may yet demonstrate significant long-term sequelae of SDB in this population.

(Chest 1992; 101:345-49)

Section snippets

Subjects

Potential subjects were recruited from a variety of sources, including newspaper advertisements, notices in community centers, and a volunteer pool maintained by the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, a multidisciplinary aging center based at the University of Kentucky. Subjects were required to be between 50 and 80 years of age; to be in good health; to have no history of neurologic, pulmonary, or psychiatric disease; to be without sleep complaints apart from normal age-related changes (eg, not

RESULTS

Demographic characteristics of the 92 subjects appear in Table 1. There were 44 men and 48 women, all of whom were white. Based on mean education levels, these subjects were from an above-average socioeconomic group. Overall, the subjects had a mean age of about 64 years and a mean weight of about 73.35 kg.

Table 2 presents data on SDB indices from the sample. The average AHI for this group was 2.7, and the average number of 4 percent desaturations was about 44. Fourteen subjects (15 percent)

DISCUSSION

The major finding of this study was the lack of relationship between SDB indices and comprehensive measures of daytime functioning. These results confirm previous findings from a similar protocol,16 as well as extend the conclusions reached by other recent studies indicating a lack of effect of SDB in healthy elderly persons assessed for various subjective and objective aspects of daytime functioning.7, 8 One important implication of the present results is that SDB occurring in an otherwise

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We are grateful to Lynn Harbison for administrative assistance and secretarial support.

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    Supported by the American Lung Association of Kentucky (D.T.R.B.), National Institutes of Health Heart, Lung and Blood Division (B.A.P), National Institutes of Health Clinical Research Center Grant, Sanders-Brown Center on Aging (D.T.R.B.), and the National Institute on Aging—Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (F.A.S.).

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