In 2025, around 24 million Americans are estimated to suffer from sleep apnea, and around 90% of these cases are undiagnosed. Now, a groundbreaking new study warns that this is going to rapidly increase as the planet warms.
New research by scientists at Australia’s Flinders University has found a link between new cases of sleep apnea and climate change, which is on trend with many chronic conditions and diseases expected to be more prevalent as temperatures change. Increased temperatures are expected to also increase the severity of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), with cases doubling in most countries within the next century.
“This study helps us to understand how environmental factors like climate might affect health by investigating whether ambient temperatures influence the severity of OSA,” said Dr. Bastien Lechat, a research associate at the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health. “Overall, we were surprised by the magnitude of the association between ambient temperature and OSA severity.”
“Higher temperatures were associated with a 45% increased likelihood of a sleeper experiencing OSA on a given night,” he added.
Around a billion people around the world are already impacted by sleep apnea, which at best causes daytime fatigue, but is a key factor in elevated blood pressure and in turn stroke and heart attack. If left untreated, it also increases the risk of a suite of conditions including depression, dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
In this study, scientists looked at the data of 116,620 people around the globe using a mattress sensor to assess their OSA severity. Each individual had their bed fitted with a sensor, which recorded around 500 separate nights of sleep data from each person. This information was then paired with corresponding 24-hour temperature information drawn from climate models.
“Using our modeling, we can estimate how burdensome the increase in OSA prevalence due to rising temperature is to society in terms of wellbeing and economic loss,” said Lechat. “The increase in OSA prevalence in 2023 due to global warming was associated with a loss of approximately 800,000 healthy life years across the 29 countries studied.”
“This number is similar to other medical conditions, such as bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease or chronic kidney diseases,” he added.
So what does hotter temperatures have to do with how well we sleep? Previous studies had linked an increase ambient temperature in the bedroom with poorer sleep quality. Not surprisingly, these results predict that people in lower socioeconomic areas and countries will be at a higher risk of OSA, due to a lack of access to cooling devices such as air conditioning.
“Importantly, these findings varied by region, with people in European countries seeing higher rates of OSA when temperatures rise than those in Australia and the United States, perhaps due to different rates of air conditioning usage,” Lechat said.
Economically, this climate-induced increase in OSA is expected to create a huge financial burden – US$68 billion from wellbeing loss and $30 billion thanks to a negative impact on workplace productivity.
“Our findings highlight that without greater policy action to slow global warming, OSA burden may double by 2100 due to rising temperatures,” Lechat added.
Senior researcher on the paper, Professor Danny Eckert, says that while the study is one of the largest of its kind, it was skewed towards high socio-economics countries and individuals, likely to have access to more favorable sleeping environments and air conditioning.
“This may have biased our estimates and led to an under-estimation of the true health and economic cost,” said senior author Danny Eckert, a professor at Flinders University.
The researchers believe this first-of-a-kind study tables the urgency of interventions – in both providing better access to comfortable sleeping conditions for everyone, and boosting awareness to increase OSA diagnosis so people can effectively manage the serious condition.
“Higher rates of diagnosis and treatment will help us to manage and reduce the adverse health and productivity issues caused by climate related OSA,” said Eckert. “Going forward, we want to design intervention studies that explore strategies to reduce the impact of ambient temperatures on sleep apnea severity as well as investigate the underlying physiological mechanisms that connect temperature fluctuations to OSA severity.”
In May, scientists assessed sleep data from more than 200,000 people in China and also found that rising ambient temperatures would have a huge physical, mental and economical impact on residents as the planet continued to warm.
While the new study has many variables and limitations – including being able to accurately capture ambient temperatures, which vary considerably depending on sleeping areas and arrangements – researchers say it should, at the very least, encourage people to be assessed for OSA and understand their personal risks.
“Our study underscores the potential significant impact of increasing ambient temperatures on the prevalence of OSA, globally,” the researchers wrote. “Without substantially greater policy change to slow global warming, the health and economic burdens associated with OSA may double by 2100.”
“Our findings also emphasize the immediate need for targeted measures to potentially minimize the health and economic impacts of the growing OSA prevalence associated with rising temperatures,” they concluded.
The study was published in the journal Nature Communications
Source: Flinders University via Scimex