Sleep Apnea and Risk of Influenza-Associated Severe Acute Respiratory Infection: Real-World Evidence

PURPOSE: We executed the presented retrospective cohort study with the purpose of probing the risk of severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) following influenza in patients with sleep apnea. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We executed this real-world study by gathering Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) data. From a database containing 1 million individuals sampled at random from the NHIRD, we identified all patients aged 20 years or older with a sleep apnea diagnosis between 1997 and 2013 as the study group. We established a comparison cohort of individuals without sleep apnea by randomly matching patients with respect to monthly income, gender, urbanization level, and age at a 1:4 ratio. Follow-up was performed until death or the end of 2015 for both groups. We determined the study outcome to be the occurrence of influenza-associated SARI. RESULTS: We enrolled 6508 and 26,032 patients into the study and comparison groups, respectively. A significantly higher cumulative incidence of influenza-associated SARI was discovered in the study group (p < 0.001). In our multivariate analysis, sleep apnea, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and coronary artery disease were independent risk factors for influenza-associated SARI. The hazard ratio of sleep apnea for influenza-associated SARI was 1.98 (95% CI: 1.26–3.10) after adjustment for all comorbidities, gender, age, monthly income, and urbanization level. CONCLUSION: Sleep apnea increased the risk of influenza-associated SARI. We suggest that physicians be cautious about the development of severe influenza illness in patients with sleep apnea. Vaccination and early oseltamivir administration should be actively considered in this group of patients.