CPAP- Life or Death or just Quality of Life

[Mogy]

Studies have shown that CPAP therapy improves quality of life but surprisingly does not improve outcomes with people that have heart disease.
Link
http://www.georgeinstitute.org.cn/media-...ithout-any

Is this something that posters on this board agree with? or is it total nonsense?

[Crimson Nape]

I would take the article with a grain of salt.  .  .  Unless I'm the exception to the norm.  I had uncontrolled high blood pressure (210/120 @ 45 pulse) and was sent for a sleep study because the cardiologist was out of ideas, tests, and medications.  Now my BP is 120/80 @ 65 pulse with less medication than prior to CPAP treatment.

[Hojo]

I may never know if CPAP will ONLY improve my health because if it doesn't, then I would be dead and I wouldn't know it. 

I too started to develop very high blood pressure (I had mild hypertension) and I had to go WAY up on my meds to ATTEMPT to get my pressure down.  After about a month (or less), my BP dropped like a rock and now I'm cutting way back on meds, so from that perspective I'm very happy. 

I don't take one study to be gospel, it has to be able to be reproduced by others and the other thing, the only way to do a good study is to wait YEARS to see how many people die from high blood pressure, stroke, heart failure, compared to those with similar symptoms are on CPAP.   It would take a good long time to look at a double blind study and if they need me to be in the study, then I want to be part of the treatment group.

[Sleep2Snore]

Studies like these are very sceptical without knowing their control and how they did the study.
Of course people live longer, they are less likely to be involved in a car accident.
That bit of sarcasm over, I reckon I would ot be here now if it were not for CPAP.
I had high blood pressure and I was struggling to do anything for long, my body just wanted to shut down.
It is ok for these people that get funding to do these studies, for what purpose I don;t know, but I bet i he suffered he would have it have a very different outcome.
How can they say it has no effect on the outcome, I was so knackered I could have lay down to die at any time.

[Walla Walla]

Here's a link to the actual Article in the New England Journal of Medicine. It includes links to a 80 page Appendix inside the article.

It has more detail on how they did the study. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJ...cleResults

[pholynyk]

Thank you for looking that up, WallaWalla. I think we looked at this article last year when it came out, but I'm not sure.
The important point here is that the mean duration of treatment was about 3½ per night - which doesn't even count as compliant by our standards. So no wonder there wasn't much difference between users and control groups. I'd like to see a breakdown of 'primary end point' against users' hours of use per night. My prediction would be that the higher the hours of use, the lower the morbidity. Just a guess...

[Walla Walla]

It seems like the test was seeing if CPAP could cure people who already had heart problems. It had nothing to due with preventing heart problems. To qualify for the study you had to have heart problems. I would call that stacking the deck. The real question should have been how many people did CPAP prevent from developing heart problems in the first place. I also agree it was a very low standard at 3.3 hours per night on CPAP.

[chill]

Previous discussion http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/Thread-...cpap-users

[pholynyk]

Thanks for digging that out, Chill; I didn't look far enough back.

It's a good discussion of the limits of this study.

[Doza]

Previous discussion http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/Thread-...cpap-users

I'm gobsmacked that that 'study' even got past the first phase in design.    Blind Freddy could see such a low compliance base would be pointless and should have been challenged at the get-go.
Common sense, where were you?