Education＆ScienceEducational Article

Comment by Mark Lavercombe: The association between obstructive sleep apnoea and cardiovascular risk is well established, however common metrics such as apnoea-hypopnoea index (AHI) and oxygen desaturation index (ODI) don’t fully explain the association. In this study using data for 5804 participants from the Sleep Heart Health Study, a series of hypoxic indices are evaluated for their predictive accuracy and concordance for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality outcomes. The Sleep Breathing Impairment Index (SBII) and proportion of sleep time with the duration of respiratory events causing desaturation (pRED_3p) metrics performed best for predicting the risk of CVD mortality and morbidity in OSA patients, respectively.