SLEEP 2026 | Prevalence of OSA among consecutive patients with AF using WatchPAT home sleep testing

I am speaking on the prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea among consecutively enrolled ambulatory atrial fibrillation patients. All the patients were recruited from the Atrial Fibrillation Center of Excellence Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. And so we enrolled these patients and tested them with WatchPAT devices to understand the prevalence of sleep apnea among all comers with atrial fibrillation, regardless of treatment status, whether they were getting an ablation or not, regardless of symptoms and pattern of atrial fibrillation. And we found that overall in the total sample of 180 patients, there was about an 80% prevalence of sleep apnea using a 3% AHI for at least mild sleep apnea. About 70% of our population had paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and about 30% of our population had persistent atrial fibrillation. And we learned that the patients with persistent atrial fibrillation were much more likely to have moderate or severe sleep apnea. And we also tested all the patients with Epworth sleepiness scales and STOP questionnaires. And consistent with prior literature, we found that these were extremely poorly predictive of the presence of sleep apnea among all the patients with atrial fibrillation. And that the STOP itself was weakly correlated with increasing AHI with the Fisher exact test and a statistically significant p-value less than 0.001. But nonetheless not great screening tools again consistent with what the prior literature has shown in patients with atrial fibrillation. We also found that patients with atrial fibrillation and moderate to severe sleep apnea were more likely to have lower atrial fibrillation-related quality of life measured by standardized questionnaires used to measure atrial fibrillation-specific quality of life in patients with AFib. And so our data really suggests that there’s a really high prevalence of sleep apnea among all types of patients with atrial fibrillation in an ambulatory setting, that we know that the commonly used clinical predictive tools don’t work well in this population. And it suggests that patients with persistent AFib are more likely to have moderate to severe sleep apnea and are more likely to have a lower AF-related quality of life. And so future directions should really look at whether treatment of patients with persistent AFib improves outcomes, if it improves that AF-related quality of life, as well as whether these patients have more burden AFib at night versus during the daytime.

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