Chest
Clinical Investigations: Sleep and BreathingSleep Apnea in Marfan's Syndrome: Increased Upper Airway Collapsibility During Sleep
Section snippets
METHODS
We studied 12 patients with Marfan's syndrome (8 men, 4 women) who had previously undergone standard nocturnal polysomnography as part of a prevalence study.7 All of these patients had been randomly recruited from the Marfan clinic at our institution. Ten of the patients in this study were randomly recruited from the original cohort; the remaining two patients were specifically selected because they were the only nonsnoring, nonapneic patients. We compared them with six age-, height-, and
RESULTS
Anthropomorphic data are presented in Table 1. Patients had mean age of 34 ± 3 years, mean height of 183 ± 3 cm, and mean weight of 73 ± 4 kg. Control subjects were well matched for age, height, and weight. The control group consisted of five men and one woman, while the patient group consisted of eight men and four women. Ten of the 12 patients were previously shown to have mild to moderate OSA on standard polysomnography, with a mean AHI of 25 ± 4/h (range, 6 to 48), and mean minimum oxygen
DISCUSSION
In a previous study, we showed that 64% of randomly recruited patients with Marfan's syndrome (n=25) had OSA, with a mean AHI of 20 ± 3.7 These patients are quite different from the typical sleep apnea population—they are tall, thin, and young. Therefore, it is possible that different mechanisms are important in the pathogenesis of OSA in this group. Our data herein demonstrate that patients with Marfan's syndrome have significantly increased upper airway collapsibility during sleep compared
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Supported by a scholarship from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (Dr. Cistulli).