A sleep study of patients with systemic mastocytosis (SM) found that disordered breathing characteristic of obstructive sleep apnea is fairly common, according to results recently published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.
Of the nine participants, eight individuals met the criteria for obstructive sleep apnea, three of whom had severe disease. Obstructive sleep apnea is a sleep disorder that occurs when airway muscles relax during sleep and block the airway, briefly pausing breathing and interrupting sleep.
Several studies have shown that individuals with SM often report fatigue and insomnia. However, polysomnography data, which monitors key physiological signals during sleep, is limited in this population.
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The single-center Turkish study included adults with SM who underwent polysomnography after temporarily discontinuing antihistamine use. Overall, two individuals reported excessive daytime sleepiness and six reported brain fog.
Polysomnography revealed the median sleep efficiency — the amount of time in bed that’s spent asleep — was 91.4%, with a range of 73.5% to 96.9%. Generally, a sleep efficiency of at least 85% to 90% is considered healthy. Participants fell asleep in a median of nine minutes and had a median sleep time of about 5.7 hours. The number of arousals from sleep ranged from 0 to 125, with a median of 55.
The distributions of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep stages generally fell within normal bounds. One patient had no observed REM sleep, though, and some took a relatively long among of time to enter REM sleep.
These findings do not definitively conclude that SM directly contributes to sleep disturbances, in part due to the small sample size. Because eight of the nine participants had an elevated body mass index (BMI), which is a major risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea, these results cannot distinguish sleep disturbances caused by weight from those caused by SM. In the future, larger studies that adjust for BMI could help to clarify the relationship between SM and sleep.
“The present findings should be interpreted as descriptive and hypothesis-generating,” the authors concluded. “Despite these limitations, the results support considering sleep disorders during the clinical evaluation of selected patients with SM, particularly those with fatigue, non-restorative sleep, snoring, witnessed apneas, or cognitive complaints.”
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