Obstructive sleep apnea and hypertriglyceridaemia share common genetic background: Results of a twin study

Obstructive sleep apnea is associated with an increased risk of hypertension, diabetes and dyslipidaemia. Both obstructive sleep apnea and its comorbidities are at least partly heritable, suggesting a common genetic background. Our aim was to analyse the heritability of the relationship between obstructive sleep apnea and its comorbidities using a twin study. Forty-seven monozygotic and 22 dizygotic adult twin pairs recruited from the Hungarian Twin Registry (mean age 51 ± 15 years) attended an overnight diagnostic sleep study. A medical history was taken, blood pressure was measured, and blood samples were taken for fasting glucose, total cholesterol, triglyceride, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and lipoprotein (a). To evaluate the heritability of obstructive sleep apnea and its comorbidities bivariate analysis was performed with an adjustment for age, gender, body mass index (BMI) and smoking after false discovery rate correction and following exclusion of patients on lipid-lowering and antidiabetic medications. There was a significant correlation between indices of obstructive sleep apnea severity, such as the apnea-hypopnea index, oxygen desaturation index and percentage of sleep time spent with oxygen saturation below 90%, as well as blood pressure, serum triglyceride, lipoprotein (a) and glucose levels (all p < .05). The bivariate analysis revealed a common genetic background for the correlations between serum triglyceride and the oxygen desaturation index (r = .63, p = .03), as well as percentage of sleep time spent with oxygen saturation below 90% (r = .58, p = .03). None of the other correlations were significantly genetically or environmentally determined. This twin study demonstrates that the co-occurrence of obstructive sleep apnea with hypertriglyceridaemia has a genetic influence and heritable factors play an important role in the pathogenesis of dyslipidaemia in obstructive sleep apnea.