Waking Up for the Bathroom & Sleep Apnea

Waking up to go to the bathroom is a familiar routine for many people. They wake up because they have to urinate. Or maybe not. Not if researchers from New Mexico are right. Their study, published in the most recent online issue of  Sleep and Breathing isn’t the first to make this connection.

Nocturia (the need to urinate at night) has been linked to sleep apnea (brief periods of not breathing) before, identifying that about one-quarter of men in the United States have this problem, as do 10% of women.  This study, however, was looking to see if the could identify nocturia first and then sleep apnea, which is difficult to diagnose if someone lives alone and has no bed partner to report snoring or apneic periods.

The researchers studied 1,007 adults who were attending one of two sleep clinics. Seven hundred ninety seven had sleep apnea, 777 snored, and 839 said they had nocturia.

Neither snoring nor nocturia was proof of apnea, but the two symptoms were similar in their power to predict it: snoring was reported by 82.6 percent of apnea sufferers, and 84.8 percent of apnea sufferers reported nocturia.

The point of this study is to show that people shouldn’t automatically assume that they woke up because they needed to urinate – they may have woken up because they were experiencing sleep apnea and when awakened, realized they needed to go to the bathroom.

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Image: PhotoXpress.com