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Tracking the “flare-ups”
The research was conducted on 1,647 subjects, all of which had confirmed COPD. During this period, researchers tracked the “flare-ups,” a short-term worsening of the symptoms, in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) for three years and compared their incidence with self-reported data on sleep quality.
The results of the study suggest that inadequate sleep may increase the risk of a flare-up by up to 95 percent when compared to people with good sleep. The lead author of the study, Aaron Baugh, MD, a clinical resident at the UCSF Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy and Sleep Medicine, and the Cardiovascular Research Institute, suggests that the findings can also provide an explanation of why COPD affects African American patients worse than white patients.
“African Americans are over-represented in low-income neighborhoods, where people are less likely to have good quality sleep. They may live in crowded spaces with multiple roommates, and have less comfortable sleeping conditions, such as a couch, and they may work in a job with a varying schedule that lends itself to sleep disruption,” said Baugh. “Research shows sleep deprivation is associated with a drop in infection-fighting antibodies and protective cytokines,” he further added.
African Americans have worse sleep patterns
At first, the medium age of the study’s participants was 65, and the stage of their illness was moderate. 57 percent of the participants were male, 80 percent were white, and 14 percent were African American. Plus, all the participants were current or former smokers, and they had undergone at least one sleep evaluation before enrollment.
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