Abdominal Fat and Sleep Apnea: the Chicken or the Egg?
Response to Oltmanns
- Giora Pillar, MD, PHD12 and
- Naim Shehadeh, MD23
- 1Sleep Lab, Meyer Children's Hospital, RamBam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel
- 2Faculty of Medicine, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
- 3Pediatric Diabetes Unit, Meyer Children's Hospital, Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel
- Corresponding author: Giora Pillar, gpillar{at}tx.technion.ac.il
We thank Dr. Oltmanns for the important, eye-opening comments raised in her online letter to the editor (1). Indeed, in our article we discuss the complex relationships between obesity/abdominal fat and sleep disordered breathing (SDB) (2). While the effects of obesity on upper airway collapsibility are well established, the potential SDB-induced weight gain is less understood.
The major processes in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are sleep fragmentation (and consequently daytime somnolence and sympathetic nerve activation) and intermittent hypoxia/reoxygenation (and consequently …
