Pirate's Cove

Yes, your fault. Not the fault of the Elites who drive in big fossil fueled limos and fly private fossil fueled jets, of course. Just you, Mr and Mrs middle class, who take the kids around in fossil fueled mini-vans

Climate Change Is Worsening Sleep Apnea

We all have cause to take climate change personally. Not only do higher temperatures lead to such mega-events as droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and floods, they also affect human health—exacerbating asthma, allergies, cardiovascular disease, the spread of water-borne pathogens, and more. Now, it appears that a warming world affects us in one other, potentially life-threatening way. That’s according to a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper presented May 18 at the 2025 gathering of the American Thoracic Society in San Francisco. Researchers found that as the heat increases, so too does the incidence and severity of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), increasing the risk of hypertension, heart attack, stroke, and death.

Sounds like one of those drug commercials with people dancing and laughing and doing fun things, where taking the medicine results in extreme diarrhea, vomiting, and up to and including death.

“We were surprised at the magnitude of the association between ambient temperature and OSA severity,” said Bastien Lechat, the lead author of the paper and a senior research fellow at South Australia’s Flinders Health and Medicine Research Institute, in a statement that accompanied the recent presentation. “This study really highlights the societal burden associated with the increase in OSA prevalence due to rising temperatures.”

A 1.6F increase in global temperatures in 175 years is not a big deal.

In order to conduct their work, Lechat and his team collected data from 125,295 users of an under-mattress apnea sensor, in 41 countries, gathering readings recorded from January 2020 to September 2023. The sensor consists of an inflatable mat positioned beneath the point of the mattress that is at chest level with the sleeper. Changes in the air pressure within the mat record bodily, respiratory, and even cardiac motion. “By analyzing these signals with proprietary machine learning … the device can estimate a range of metrics, including sleep duration, sleep stages, awakenings, and periods of breathing cessation,” Lechat said in an email to TIME. Those cessations in breathing are what constitutes apnea.

Large study group. Is there any comparison to previous decades? Or, how about the Little Ice Age? Previous Holocene warm periods?

The researchers collected a median of 509 nights of readings from each individual, and then correlated the results with 24-hour ambient temperature models. The results were striking, showing a significant association between apnea and temperature in 29 of the countries studied, or well more than half. In those places, rising heat was associated with a 45% increase in the likelihood of an individual having at least one apnea episode on a given night. That does not come cheap. Crunching their numbers, the researchers estimated that across the sample group, the increase in apnea incidence resulted in a loss of more than 785,000 healthy life years—or years without disability or death—in 2023 alone. Loss of healthy life years has an economic cost too, with an estimated $32 billion reduction in workplace productivity in 2023.

Um, most have air conditioning. Climate controls. If it is warmer at night, and I won’t argue that it isn’t, mostly due to air pollution and more buildings holding heat at lower levels at night, which has little to do with CO2, we still keep our homes at a good temperature. I keep it 72 during the warm/hot months. Even if it is 85 outside at night, I’m still cool at 72. Especially with ceiling fans on. They are always on in Casa Teach.

For now, the mechanism linking temperature and the cessation of breathing is not clear. Lechat and his colleagues speculate that heat may lead to lighter sleep—which is the stage of sleep during which apnea tends to be more severe. Behavioral factors may be at play too: when temperatures are higher, individuals may be less likely to wear their continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) masks, which are prescribed to reduce or prevent apnea.

So, the whole rest of the article, in fact the “study”, is just bullshit? Scaremongering mule fritters based on speculation?

Funny how so many Cult of Climastrology articles start out with Doom Is Coming! and end in “well, um, you see, it’s all speculation”.

Read: Your Fault: Sleep Apnea Worse Because You Drove A Fossil Fueled Vehicle »