That can have worrying implications not only for health, but also the economy: OSA is associated with significant decreases in workplace productivity and absenteeism, and as it becomes more prevalent with rising temperatures, that could cost the global economy $30 billion in lost productivity, and another $68 billion from worsened well-being.
Researchers analyzed sleep data of 116,620 participants across 29 countries over 3.5 years, using an OSA monitor cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to establish the link between daily ambient temperature and nightly OSA status.
“Higher rates of diagnosis and treatment will help us to manage and reduce the adverse health and productivity issues caused by climate related OSA,” coauthor Danny Eckert said in the press release.
In the study, researchers estimated that the global warming-related increases in OSA prevalence in 2023 was associated with a loss of 788,198 healthy life years in 29 countries.
Given how OSA impacts mood and energy levels caused by disrupted sleep, it’s common that people experience lower productivity and more frequent missed days at work. But if OSA frequency and severity continues to increase, that could be catastrophic for the global economy. In 2023, researchers observed that the increase in OSA led to an additional 25 million absenteeism days across the 29 studied countries, leading to an economic cost of $30 billion from the lost labor.
Researchers caution that the study population likely underestimates the potential health and economic burden: All participants owned a sleep tracking device and resided in highly developed countries with greater access to heat-mitigating tools like air conditioning, leaving lower socioeconomic groups with the greatest heat burden underrepresented.
With the mean global temperatures projected to increase by 2.1°C to 3.4°C, the impacts of heat are likely to worsen.
“Our findings highlight that without greater policy action to slow global warming, OSA burden may double by 2100 due to rising temperatures,” Lechat said.
“Going forward, we want to design intervention studies that explore strategies to reduce the impact of ambient temperatures on sleep apnea severity as well as investigate the underlying physiological mechanisms that connect temperature fluctuations to OSA severity,” Eckert added.
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