A recent study conducted by the National Institute of Health's (NIH) RECOVER Initiative with support from NYU Langone Health suggests that sleep apnea may greatly increase the risk for long COVID in adults, according to a press release.
To better understand the connection, the research team studied data from three RECOVER research networks of patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 between March 2020 and February 2022. Two networks (the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) with 330,000 patients and the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) with 1.7 million patients) included adult patients. The third patient cohort included the pediatric-focused PEDSnet network, comprised of 102,000 children.
According to the study, which was published in the journal "Sleep," a prior diagnosis of sleep apnea may increase the risk of long-term COVID-19 symptoms in adults. The researchers found that the PCORnet group had a 12% increase in risk for long COVID, while the N3C group had a 75% risk increase.
The findings were important even after the researchers accounted for other known risk factors for long COVID such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes.
The researchers hypothesized that the differences in the percentage increases in long COVID risk between the study groups could be explained by differing definitions of long COVID, study populations and in analysis methods of patient records.
"A strength of the work is that the link between sleep apnea and long COVID persisted regardless of how the researchers in our study defined long COVID or gathered data," said senior study author and NYU Langone Health Epidemiology Division Professor and Director Lona Thorpe, Ph.D., MPH. "This study is the first collaboration of this focus and scale to find that adults with sleep apnea are at greater risk for long COVID."
RECOVER CSC senior research scientist Hannah Mandel said there is still a lot to learn about long COVID.
"People with sleep apnea who get infected with COVID should seek early treatment, pay attention to their symptoms and keep up with their vaccinations to lower the risk of infection in the first place," Mandel said.
