OSA and Cancer Link

[moonslice]

My mother, who is most certainly NOT a doctor, called me yesterday, on my first day back from vacation, to tell me I should stop using my CPAP because she thinks it could give me cancer. What?! Her reasoning is that my uncle (not blood-related) has aggressive brain cancer that is not responding to treatment and he used a CPAP for 5 years for OSA. She told me to "read about it."

Well, the only thing I came up with is that there's a link between having OSA and getting cancer. But no link found regarding CPAP usage. Anyone have more thoughts or research on this? I'm not saying I believe her, but I'm also disturbed to find out about the link between OSA and cancer. Here's one article to look over:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/2 ... risk/?_r=0

[Goofproof]

I have been using mine for over 11 years, I died from brain cancer 6 years ago, I think she may have a valid point, it also seems to make my eyebrows grow. Jim

[flightco]

I have been using mine for over 11 years, I died from brain cancer 6 years ago, I think she may have a valid point, it also seems to make my eyebrows grow. Jim

Jim, you might be on to something, it makes the hair in my ears grow.

We're just a couple wild and crazy guys...

[Guest]

The body repairs itself when you sleep so it makes sense that anything that interferes with sleep would make the body susceptible to disease. So its not cpap but untreated apnea that is a likely cause.

Could it be that like many he wore the cpap every nite but it was not dialed in?

[Guest]

I have been using mine for over 11 years, I died from brain cancer 6 years ago, I think she may have a valid point, it also seems to make my eyebrows grow. Jim

The way I heard it, Jim, your brain cancer died of malnutrition.

[rick blaine]

Hi moonslice,

You do know that journalists and 'medical correspondents' sit around in their offices, desperate for a story, going, "Please, Lord, give me something I can write about"? And that they scour the medical journals - and these days, the in-box full of press releases and the conference-promoting websites - looking for something - anything - they can turn into copy?

The more alarmist the better. Something with 'cancer' in the headline or the lede is gold.

Maybe you don't. Just as maybe you don't know how to deconstruct (that means take apart and analyse and rubbish) one of these news stories.

1. What is your mother saying (or hinting at)? What is the journalist saying (or hinting at)?

That 'sleep apnea causes cancer'? Or that untreated sleep apnea causes cancer?

2. Every one of these shock-horror cancer stories is actually an indicator of increasing health across the population. The better modern medicine gets at tackling all sorts of other diseases, the only one left to die of is heart disease, or some form of cancer.

But that doesn't sell newspapers.

3. While this news story is full of '65 per cent' this or 'five times the rate of' that, what it barely mentions - not till the end, which not every reader gets too, having been too shocked and alarmed by the first 15 'graphs - is that, in the Spanish study, nobody got treatment.

And in the Winsconsin study, the researchers (for some of their figures) factored out the people who were getting CPAP treatment.

Tell your mother, "Look, Mom - CPAP does not cause cancer. Cancer causes cancer.

"If anything, consistent and properly-adjusted CPAP treatment puts off the day (or night) that somebody gets cancer."

End of story.

[JDS74]

Here is a link to an Australian study of untreated OSA.

Sleep Apnea and 20-Year Follow-Up for All-Cause Mortality, Stroke, and Cancer Incidence and Mortality in the Busselton Health Study Cohort

Note the part in the study that the patients were untreated.

The emerging but strong association with cancer is a key
area for further investigation aimed at determining causality.

[49er]

Rick Blaine said,

""The more alarmist the better. Something with 'cancer' in the headline or the lede is gold.""

On a related note, when I went to a journalism program several years ago, even a six year old understood that sensationalistic headlines sold more newspapers. Pretty sad.

49er

[chunkyfrog]

Your mother is nutz. Keep an eye on her.
Ask her what day it is--every day.
If she cannot answer correctly, check her into a home.
{{Note: just kidding about the home--unless her senility is a danger to her.}}

[Arlene1963]

Here is a link to an Australian study of untreated OSA.

Sleep Apnea and 20-Year Follow-Up for All-Cause Mortality, Stroke, and Cancer Incidence and Mortality in the Busselton Health Study Cohort

Now this is interesting .. quoted from the study linked to above ...

"Mild sleep apnea (stopping breathing 5 to 15 times per hour of sleep) was associated with a halving of the risk for all-cause mortality (but no other outcome). However, it only did this in fully adjusted models (see Table 2 and also see lack of risk in Figure 1). We also indirectly tested the potential for mild sleep apnea to be helpful or harmful in the linear models presented at the bottoms of Tables 2 and 3; these were either nonsignificant or less predictive than separating the severities of sleep apnea into independent categories. We tentatively suggest this might mean that mild sleep apnea protects people against the effects of their other clustered cardiometabolic risk factors. So a person with multiple traditional risk factors has a lower chance of death if they also have a case of mild sleep apnea than if they did not have any sleep apnea. Mild sleep apnea has been observed to protect against death previously and might be biologically plausible if a mild case of sleep apnea has beneficial effects in the same way that exercise while awake does. Another potential mechanism might be ischemic preconditioning. People with sleep apnea who survive a myocardial infarction appear to be protected against some of the damage. However, this fails to explain why mild OSA was nonsignificantly associated with protection against cancer (see Table 3)"

Moonslice, here's a large Canadian study on OSA and the development of Cancer, published in 2014. The full text version indicates that the authors took into account reported CPAP versus non CPAP use, and this didn't alter the conclusion. The full text version is available to read at this site.

http://www.cmaj.ca/content/186/13/985.s ... 186/13/985

[Goofproof]

I have been using mine for over 11 years, I died from brain cancer 6 years ago, I think she may have a valid point, it also seems to make my eyebrows grow. Jim

The way I heard it, Jim, your brain cancer died of malnutrition.

At least I'm safe from the Brain eating Zombies. Jim

[chunkyfrog]

My grandson has a t-shirt that says, "Attention zombies; brain already devoured by video games."

[Chevie]

A few of you are way friggin overthinking this.

The frog got it right,

Your mother is nutz.

[Janknitz]

It makes sense that UNTREATED OSA can be a risk factor for cancer. All those stress hormones being circulated through your body all night to try to keep you breathing are a source of inflammation, and that's a risk factor for many disease states.

It makes no sense to not use CPAP because people with OSA may have higher rates of cancer. One does not follow the other.

The fact that your uncle used CPAP and STILL had cancer does not mean that CPAP did not work. It means that there may have been many contributing factors that CPAP can't fix, at least untreated OSA wasn't one of them.

[moonslice]

Chunky frog, yeah, she's a little nutz! Maybe she won't fixate on this. When she gets something in her head, she's like a cat.

Arlene, wild study! It's kind of like high cholesterol also having a protective benefit against cancer.

My family is a little sensitive to the whole cancer thing, so that might be why my mom is worried. My brother had a rare form of cancer when he was only 2, but he survived. I think it did something to my Mom's brain! Maybe she was already a little craze and I was too young to notice it before.

I think she also told me to "read about it" because maybe she can't read. I've always had a theory she can't read, but she astonished me earlier this year by opening a fortune cookie and reading what was inside. She was correct. I guess, she can read... I still seriously don't know!

Anyhow, thanks for the funny responses! And the take on research perspectives.