Weight Loss Gods Way
Obesity is a major risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea, which is a serious sleep disorder that causes people to stop breathing for short periods repeatedly — sometimes hundreds of times — during the night.
In 2009, researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute showed that overweight and obese men who lost weight on a severely calorie restricted diet over nine weeks had big improvements in their sleep apnea symptoms.
In their newly published follow-up, the researchers report that the improvements were largely maintained over the next year, even though some patients regained much of the weight they had lost.
“Our earlier findings proved the principle that weight loss improves sleep apnea, but the criticism was that the patients would not be able to maintain the weight loss or these improvements,” Karolinska Institute associate professor of clinical epidemiology Martin Neovius, PhD, tells WebMD.