Treatment Discontinuation Following Bariatric Surgery in Obstructive Sleep Apnea: a Controlled Cohort Study

Uncontrolled studies looking at the discontinuation of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) treatment after bariatric surgery (BS) have suggested that surgery improves OSA. However, this discontinuation of OSA treatment by BS patients has never been compared to a matched population without BS. The objectives of this study are to evaluate whether BS increases OSA treatment discontinuation compared to that in matched patients without BS and to identify predictive factors of OSA treatment discontinuation in BS patients. The study took place in an ambulatory, tertiary hospital.

We included 61 OSA patients who underwent BS in a retrospective controlled cohort study. The computerized matching procedure included age, sex, body mass index, year of starting OSA treatment, treatment type, and duration selected 59 controls matched to 28 patients with BS. The main outcome was OSA treatment discontinuation within 2 years after BS.

Patients with BS stopped OSA treatment more often than controls, usually between 6 months and 1 year after BS: hazards ratio (HR (95 %, CI)) 15.93 (3.29, 77.00). Before 6 months or beyond 1 year after BS, treatment discontinuation was not different between BS patients and controls. In univariate analyses, female gender, absence of co-morbidities, greater weight loss, and lower baseline OSA severity were associated with stopping OSA treatment after BS. No factor remained independently associated in multivariate analysis.

Apneic patients having BS stop OSA treatment more than matched controls. Treatment discontinuation may be attributed to recovery or to abandonment. The effect of BS on OSA may have been overestimated in uncontrolled BS studies that ignored basal OSA treatment discontinuation in routine clinical practice.