Metabolic Disorders in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Copyright: © 2012 Steiropoulos P, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is now recognized to be associated with several metabolic abnormalities. Obesity is a confounding factor for these perturbations, but it may also be a consequence of OSA [1]. Impaired Glucose Metabolism and OSA It is now well established that OSA and impaired glucose metabolism [including insulin resistance, glucose intolerance and type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (DM)] may coexist. Cross-sectional studies have demonstrated that up to 30 % of patients with OSA, diagnosed by polysomnography, have type 2 diabetes [2], while 86 % of obese patients with type 2 diabetes have OSA [3]. However, due to confounding factors such as obesity, a causal relationship between OSA an