Good adherence to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy was found to improve complaints of fatigue and tiredness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), according to a study in the June 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. This adds to evidence that these complaints are important symptoms of OSA.

Results indicate that good adherence to CPAP therapy for an average of five or more hours per night resolved baseline complaints of fatigue in 45 of 80 participants (56 percent), tiredness in 56 of 96 participants (58 percent) and sleepiness in 48 of 72 participants (67 percent); improvement of each symptom was significantly better among CPAP-adherent participants than among inadequately treated subjects. A baseline complaint of lack of energy also was resolved in 47 of 100 participants with good CPAP adherence, but this improvement failed to reach statistical significance when compared with inadequately treated participants.

According to senior investigator Ronald D. Chervin, M.D., M.S., of the Michael S. Aldrich Sleep Disorders Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich., physicians should consider the possibility of OSA as a treatable underlying cause not just for the complaint of sleepiness, but also for the chief complaints of fatigue, tiredness and lack of energy.

"We found that sleep apnea patients who used their CPAP regularly, in comparison to those who did not, had much greater success in reducing their fatigue, tiredness and sleepiness," he said. "This suggests that sleep apnea may be the cause of these symptoms, as it is a cause of sleepiness."