4 ms·
It's only over-prescription if the prevalence hasn't changed. Your friends are 10 years older now than they were a decade ago. There's more awareness of sleep
by MengerSponge 3y ago
It's only over-prescription if the prevalence hasn't changed.
Your friends are 10 years older now than they were a decade ago.
There's more awareness of sleep apnea, and when you look at the risk of treatment vs the risk of it going untreated, things strongly favor throwing a CPAP at a patient.
The other thing that's happened over the last decade is American obesity rates have continued to climb. Overweight is correlated with sleep apnea, so all things equal you'd expect to see a corresponding rise in sleep apnea rates too.
- pixl97 3y ago>It's only over-prescription if the prevalence hasn't changed. Actually you've missed one other classification. Was it previously under diagnosed? So we have underdiagnosis, increase in base rate, increase in fraudulent diagnosis. At least anecdotally based on the older people in my family that seem to snore hard and have poor sleep habits, underdiagnosis seems pretty likely to me, but I guess we'd need to see studies of randomly selected patients to know for sure.
- EricMausler 3y agoI posted directly to the original comment, but there is very strong evidence that sleep apnea was severely (~90%!) undiagnosed in 2008. 10 years ago was 2013, so hopefully that number improved between 2008 and 2013, but I'd imagine it was still a large problem.
- MengerSponge 3y agoOh yes, this is a critical point that I missed. Thanks for clarifying it!
- TylerE 3y agoYes, it was very very undergianosed, and still is in some populations (read: women). Men are diagnosed at a rate several times higher, but there is no physiological reason that would support there being anywhere close to that much.