Severe Sleep Apnea: Health Risks

Name: Severe Sleep Apnea: Health Risks
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T12:01:23+00:00
Duration: 35 s
Channel: Dr. Charles Mok
Description: YouTube informational monologue (Dr. Charles Mok) describing a 20-year Wisconsin cohort study of adults aged 30–60 which found that untreated severe…

2 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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0:35

YouTube informational monologue (Dr. Charles Mok) describing a 20-year Wisconsin cohort study of adults aged 30–60 which found that untreated severe sleep apnea was associated with about a threefold higher risk of death. The speaker stresses the clinical importance of diagnosing and treating (especially severe) sleep apnea because it affects morbidity, mortality, and survivability.

Questions this video answers

20 years

30 to 60 years

Approximately threefold (3× higher) compared with people without sleep apnea

People were randomly selected and tested for sleep apnea in a sleep clinic

Chapters

Then there's something we call mortality. Mortality is how long you will live. A 20 year study done in Wisconsin followed people. They first randomly selected people and they tested to see whether or not they had sleep apnea or not in a sleep clinic. And they followed them for 20 years. And the people that had severe sleep apnea were three times as likely to die if untreated, than the people that did not have sleep apnea. So it's really critical that if you have sleep apnea, particularly severe, that you know about it and you treat it because it affects your morbidity, mortality, your disease, and your survivability. The study for the Wisconsin study was ages 30 to 60. So these were people relatively young.