In 2003, doctors at University Hospitals noticed a trend among their patients seeking to loose weight through bariatric surgery. They suspected that sleep apnea, was going undiagnosed in these morbidly obese patients.
So doctors evaluated two groups of bariatric patients. In one group doctors only looked at the symptoms of sleep apnea and they diagnosed 56% of them with the condition. But when doctors actually watched people as they slept, they were able to diagnosis 91% with sleep apnea.
Peter Hallowell: And that was quite startling to us.
Peter Hallowell, a bariatric surgeon at UH, helped author the study.
Peter Hallowell: What that tells me is patients are walking around with severe sleep apnea and they don't know it. And they don't recognize it and neither do their physicians.
Hallowell says this shows standard clinical observations don't catch all sleep apnea sufferers. The study was recently published in the American Journal of Surgery. Lisa Ann Pinkerton, 90.3.