Nocturia May Indicate Sleep Apnea in Patients With BPH

Patients with benign prostate enlargement and nocturia may suffer from obstructive sleep apnea

FRIDAY, April 15 (HealthDay News) -- Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) may be the cause of frequent night awakenings and urination in patients with benign prostate enlargement (BPE) reporting nocturia, according to a study published in the March-April issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

Howard Tandeter, M.D., from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, and colleagues assessed whether nocturia severity in BPE patients was related to an underlying sleep disorder in 55- to 75-year-old men, randomly sampled from primary care clinics. Using the Berlin questionnaire, the presence of symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea (SOSA) was compared in 102 men with documented BPE and minimum once per night nocturia, and 100 men without BPE with a maximum of one episode per night.

The investigators found that there was significantly more weight gain, loudness of snoring, daytime sleepiness, and hypertension reported by patients with BPE. Significantly more patients in the BPE group were considered high risk for OSA compared to the control group (59 versus 31). The odds ratio for SOSA increased incrementally with the number of episodes of nocturia per night, from 1.00 with no nocturia, 2.44 with one episode, 5.75 for two to three episodes, and 12.3 for more than three episodes.

"The odds for reporting SOSAs increase among patients reporting frequent nocturia episodes. Therefore, the diagnosis of OSA should be considered seriously whenever a patient reports frequent awakenings from sleep to urinate, even when the symptom was previously attributed to the presence of BPE," the authors write.

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