There's excellent evidence now that sleep apnea is likely to be one cause of hypertension. He says recent studies in The New England Journal of Medicine and in the Journal of the American Medical Association present new, stronger evidence for a cause and effect relationship between sleep apnea and hypertension. Experts aren't sure why sleep apnea causes high blood pressure. They do know that blood pressure can increase dramatically at the end of each apnea episode - while in normal sleep, blood pressure typically goes down. Chervin says the repeated elevations in blood pressure during the night may impact levels throughout the day for apnea sufferers.
Researchers now think that sleep apnea also can trigger significant heart problems.
Another growing area of concern with sleep apnea is that it affects a person's cognitive functions like attention and short-term memory. A recent study showed that people with sleep apnea are seven times more likely to have a serious motor vehicle crash compared to people without apnea. And, another recent study compared the reaction time while driving of people with sleep apnea and those with a blood alcohol level above the legal limit for driving a motor vehicle. They found that people with apnea actually had slightly worse reaction time than those impaired by alcohol. Their results are published in the journal Neurology.