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SLEEP 2026 | Improving CPAP adherence in obstructive sleep apnea
Sairam Parthasarathy, MD, University of Arizona Health Sciences, Tucson, AZ, discusses the importance of improving adherence to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy for obstructive sleep apnea. He highlights emerging strategies, including motivational interventions and peer support, that could help translate research findings into routine clinical practice and improve long-term patient outcomes. This interview took place at the 40th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) in Baltimore, MD.
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Transcript
This is a very important issue. Everett C. Koop, who was our Surgeon General of the United States a long time ago, who came up with the recommendation that smoking is bad for health and causes cancer, which led to people stopping smoking, famously said, medications don’t work if you don’t use them. And you can argue the same with CPAP therapy for sleep apnea. If you don’t use CPAP, it’s not going to work for you...
This is a very important issue. Everett C. Koop, who was our Surgeon General of the United States a long time ago, who came up with the recommendation that smoking is bad for health and causes cancer, which led to people stopping smoking, famously said, medications don’t work if you don’t use them. And you can argue the same with CPAP therapy for sleep apnea. If you don’t use CPAP, it’s not going to work for you. You could be sitting on a shelf. Dr Sathyapala and I work across the pond in the UK and in the US, and we both work on promoting treatment adherence for individuals with obstructive sleep apnea. CPAP is the most common treatment currently in both countries. In the US, 93% of patients who are being diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea are being treated with CPAP, 6% with a dental device, and about 1% or less with the hypoglossal nerve stimulation device, and there’s an emerging group of people who are getting GLP-1 drugs, but CPAP, therefore, is the mainstay of treatment, and what we explored is the common issues and the barriers and recent findings of how we can promote the adherence, either by doing motivational enhancement therapy or by doing peer-to-peer interaction, where patients with sleep apnea educate other patients with sleep apnea to use the CPAP more regularly, so that they can derive the benefit that they have personally seen, and that is our purpose of writing the commentary, because those findings need to be implemented in the real world. A lot of research is discovered, written in journals, sits in libraries or in electronic libraries gathering dust or silicon, and is not used to benefit patients in the clinic and at the bedside. So our recommendation was, this is an issue, we need to do a better job, these are some of the recent findings, and this is the ongoing work, we need to find a different and better way of bringing those discoveries to the patients in the clinic and at the bedside. And that was the reason for our commentary.
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