Harvard Health Blog reports that there hasn’t always been consistent consensus about treatment recommendations for people with mild sleep apnea.
Nonetheless, there are several studies that have demonstrated quality of life benefits in treating mild OSA, including a recent study published in The Lancet, where researchers from 11 centers throughout the United Kingdom recruited and randomized 301 patients with mild OSA to receive CPAP plus standard of care (sleep hygiene counseling) vs. standard of care alone, and followed them over three months.
The results found that in patients with mild OSA, treatment with CPAP improved their quality of life, based on a validated questionnaire.
This study supports a comprehensive approach to evaluation and treatment of mild OSA. While all people with mild OSA may not need to be treated with CPAP, there are patients who can greatly benefit from it.
A much better study would be treating these mild OSA patients with Oral Appliance Therapy rather than CPAP. Most “mild” patients aren’t experiencing enough quality of life problems to keep them interested in wearing the very cumbersome CPAP. I predict that if this study were run with Oral Appliance Therapy (OAT) rather than Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP), the resulting quality of life improvements would be much higher.