Sleep Review Magazine

Atrial Fibrillation and Sleep Apnea

If you’ve never read this cutting edge trade journal, I strongly encourage checking it out and subscribing (free). My book, Life Saving Sleep, will be featured in next month’s edition. In the current issue, there are several interesting topics, so please look over the table of contents.

I want to focus on the cardiosvascular health article (click on link in TOC or turn to page 12), because it reveals an important trend in how sleep medicine is viewed by other healthcare professionals and institutions.

Cardiology has proven one of the shining examples of how a field of medicine can embrace a “transdiagnostic” condition, meaning considerable overlap between two fields. The two most powerful driving forces in this realm were the findings of co-occurring OSA in heart failure and in atrial fibrillation patients. Once cardiologists saw these connections and how much benefit could be gained in their patients by treating OSA along with cardiac problems, a sizeable proportion of heart doctors began sleep testing large numbers of their patients.

Although the article points out this connection has still not achieved “standard of care” status in some institutions, currently many cardiologists test for OSA in nearly all their heart failure and atrial fibrillation patients. In fact, many heart docs will not conduct specialized electrophysiological treatments on their patients’ arrhythmias unless they have been first tested and treated for OSA.

This trend is growing so fast, we would expect most cardiologists to follow these practices, relatively speaking, sooner than later.