Fat Drivers Worse Than Drinkers

[CShine]

Fat motorists may be even more dangerous than those who have been drinking, a sleep expert has warned. Dr Lee Dowson said growing obesity was fuelling a rise in the disorder sleep apnea. The disorder causes sufferers to wake as many as 1000 times a night and is blamed for daytime drowsiness. Dr Dowson says it is probably already causing many road deaths, with truck drivers likely to be affected.

Thousands of sufferers do not realise they have the condition, while others are afraid to seek treatment in case they lose their licences. The overweight are more prone to sleep apnoea, where muscles in the throat relax, obstructing the airways. Sufferers need to wake for a split second before dropping back to sleep, a pattern repeated throughout the night. That means they do not get the deep, refreshing sleep everyone needs.

Dr Dowson, who runs a sleep clinic at Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital, England, said: "They are dangerous on the road. If you put them on a driving simulator, they do worse than people who are intoxicated with alcohol."

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8523221%255E13762,00.html

[MrSlayer]

1. How stupid. n/t

[arcos]

2. how is it stupid? n/t

[Sugarbleus]

8. Here we go again with fat bashing!

When will you peeps grow the hell up!?

First of all, if one has sleep apnea they KNOW they are not feeling well and have a number of options to correct the problem. One is a CPAP machine which forces air into ones body so they no longer have that sleepiness and wake up refreshed. Another tact is surgical. Then there are those who have sleep apena but it is caused by a malfunction in the brain and those folks are NOT FAT!
Idiot!

[Venomous_Rhetoric]

13. Well....

It's true, that "fat" people have a worse problem with sleep apenia.
the fat under your chin causes more pressure and worsens the problem.
You don't have to be disgustingly obese either, just pleasantly plump.

I have the problem, and I'm not Fat, just extremely handsome, and well proportioned, but just a little "fat" in the wrong place thats not even visible can cause a problem.
If I don't get a good rest, I can literaly fall asleep standing up.
Or sitting here at the PC. Stop to think, close eyes for a sec. next thing you know an hour is missing....

[BiggJawn]

16. That's not Apnea, that's Narcolepsy

Apnea is where you stop breathing in the middle of the night. When you nod-off staring at the monitor, that's Narcolepsy.

Try getting more than 5 hours of sleep and you'll be fine.

[Snow]

21. That's not narcolepsy.....

Narcolepsy is a serious neurologic disorder, sometimes very tricky to treat, not "lack of sleep" or 'tendency to nod off'. There seems to be a major genetic component to the illness.

[kutastha]

26. Same here

I'm nowhere near obese and I have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).

And it's not easy to know you have it. I went untreated for almost 15 years til I finally figured out what was making me so tired. Falling asleep at a stoplight is what really did it for me.

OSA is indeed more common in overweight people.

OSA can interfere with driving.

But to say obesity is a danger to driving is a pretty vague association.

[Born Free]

14. "How stupid. n/t"

"Fat motorists may be even more dangerous than those who have been drinking, a sleep expert has warned. Dr Lee Dowson said growing obesity was fuelling a rise in the disorder sleep apnea."

From personal experience, I disagree that "obesity" was fueling a rise in the cases of sleep apnea. I believe the problem is doctors are only now learning to recognize and treat sleep apnea. I can not prove it as they are both dead now, but I believe both my dad and my brother had untreated sleep apnea, neither were obese. My 35 year old niece also died recently from surgery, she had severe sleep apnea all her life but they only realized that she had it within the last year or two - they "sold" her on the idea a gastric bypass operation was better as she didn't like cpap - the operation was a success but she died shorty after being released from he hospital. I also have severe sleep apnea, and admit I am too fat...I also believe cpap has been the cure of my reflux and chronic sinus problems - my doctor doesn't accept that, he says the cpap only reduced the symptoms.


I do agree that falling asleep at the wheel is very dangerous and because untreated sleep apnea patients drive that way every day, they increase their chances of getting into an accident. However, sleep apnea patients may be sleepy, but they still are able to reason and think clearly -- whereas drunks don't. An untreated sleep apnea may
doze off but a drunk will do dangerous and stupid things which may be more of a hazard then just falling asleep.

on edit: untreated sleep apnea patients learn to live being able to fall asleep easily, but it's not that they can't stay awake when doing something that interests them. Usually if they do doze off it's at red lights ect where there is nothing going on and they are bored.

[cosmicaug]

18. Maybe you're just lucky.

Born Free wrote:

untreated sleep apnea patients learn to live being able to fall asleep easily, but it's not that they can't stay awake when doing something that interests them. Usually if they do doze off it's at red lights ect where there is nothing going on and they are bored.

Though anything is possible, I very much doubt that that's the case. People can usually tell when they're sleepy. People have a lot harder time knowing when they're falling asleep (they think they have control over it and that they can handle it and hold off sleep when usually they can't) or even if they've fallen asleep. Untreated apnea patients may be different but they probably are not.

I'm afraid we probably have a rather severe data selection problem at play here that is likely to severely distort the self perception of the scary reality of falling asleep at the wheel. The difference between a short sleep episode while driving and a short sleep episode while at a stoplight is that in the latter case other impatient drivers are likely to awaken the sleeping driver through honking of the car horns and thus the self-awareness of having been asleep comes into play. That is, the only reliable way to become aware that one has been briefly asleep at the wheel when driving (as opposed to at a stoplight) is when one does it and has an accident as a result (not counting when one gets killed instantly --I reckon there'd be no awareness there).

In other words, it might not be the case that, in your sleep apnea days, you were much more likely to fall asleep at stoplights than during dull driving; instead, it could very well have been the case that you were much more likely to remember having fallen asleep at stoplight than during dull driving.

[lucidmadman]

3. Drunk drivers are the 'moral equivalent' of...

...child molesters. Yes, there's a personal story. No, I don't wish to share it. First offense=suspension of license for? One year? Second offense= suspension of license forever. Third offense=life in prison.

[celestia671]

5. I agree with you!

It's not personal for me, but it is for so many people. I've seen idiots that were obviously drunk, driving and swerving all over the road, and that's scary, especially if I have my kids with me.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. More 'Bad Fatties'

It's another article about how those unsightly fatties are harshing on our mellow!

I worked as a sleep lab tech from 1989-1995. I'm pretty familiar with "the literature".

About 10% of the obese people have apnea.

A significant number of apneic patients are of normal weight or are underweight.

Apnea can also be corrected fairly easily and simply by surgery, by a device called CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure device), or by weight loss. However, most apneic patients who get CPAP or surgery lose weight just from having more energy.

Dr. Dowson has either been badly quoted or is a miserable SOB. Having read the article, I'm inclined to think he was badly quoted.

--bkl

[lolly]

6. "Sleep Apnea Suffers as Dangerous as Drunk Drivers"

Would be the more accurate headline. The fact that overweight people are more likely to suffer from apnea does not justify the headline, since apnea is not exclusive to nor is it inevitable in overweight people.

B

[cosmicaug]

7. Obesity is a risk factor, is it not?

BareKnuckledLiberal wrote:

I worked as a sleep lab tech from 1989-1995. I'm pretty familiar with "the literature".

About 10% of the obese people have apnea.

10% sounds pretty high to me. How high is it for the non-obese? The difference between the two is what gives context.

BareKnuckledLiberal wrote:

Dr. Dowson has either been badly quoted or is a miserable SOB. Having read the article, I'm inclined to think he was badly quoted.

Are you referring to the headline? If so, it's almost certain that he had nothing to do with that. Unfortunately, headlines tend to be misleading (and tend to resemble what someone who hasn't even bothered to read the article they're referring to might come up with) more often than should be the case. This is probably a newspaper universal.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. Apnea Risk Factors

Obesity is certainly a risk factor in apnea. About 60% of the patients I tested were obese men between 35 and 65. Generally, obese apneic patients don't survive much past 65. They almost always have "the Deadly Quartet" of obesity, type-2 diabetes, hypertension, and kidney failure -- as well as hyperlipidemia, gout, cerebrovascular disease, congestive heart failure (a.k.a. pulmonary edema) and waking dyspnea (poor breathing). Most have also smoked.

Obesity itself is now usually thought of as syndromal. It does not appear to be the direct cause of all the problems, although it does aggravate them. That so-called quartet itself probably comes from an underlying glucose metabolism problem.

One of the big findings has been that stress-linked serum coritsol levels are usually very high in this group. Think about how steroids make people retain water, develop redness, and gain massive amounts of weight -- and compare to a "Pickwickian" obese man. Experiments with lab animals show that when the animal is given access to as much food as it wants, that subjecting the animal to repeated, unpredictable, unavoidable pain, even mild pain, the animal will gain weight, often becoming obese. And apnea is itself a major source of stress on the body.

The social part of the problem is that as obesity (and its related problems) becomes a greater public health issue, it also becomes more acceptable to abuse and ridicule fat people. Yes, I would consider the Redux scandal part of that abuse, as much as Jay Leno's fatty jokes -- or the (editor's edition of the) article.

So why is this happening? Well, nobody ever accused social forces of being rational or health-seeking.

--bkl

[Snow]

23. Doesn't really address the question of risk, though...

If 10% of obese people have apnea, and 5% of slim, svelte people have apnea, then the risk of apnea associated with obesity is doubled. There're a lot of medical conditions where one thing or another raise the risk some - it's component causation, and there usually is not a single sufficient cause of any disease.

[dae]

9. What a crock of shit! My older brother and his family spent three weeks

in ICU after being hit by a drunk (skinny aka boneyass)driver, my older sister spent four weeks in ICU because of another drunk (light weight), and I lost a leg from another thin intoxicated SOB.
Scientific no, factual, yes.

[kurtyboy]

12. Well, as a fat fellow, I can answer

I have sleep apnea, now treated. I commute on the freeway dozens of miles, and before treatment, I have to say I was a HUGE risk. I found myself on the shoulder a couple of times and spoke with my doctor.

He sent me to the sleep specialist, who put me on a pain-in-the-ass machine called CPAP, and I truly believe this saved my life--and the lives of anyone who would've been unfortunate to cross my path as I drifted into driving slumber. I have a new lease on my own life, but worry for those who fear retribution, or ridicule, or can't pay the insurance.

This will be a big problem. Don't just dismiss it with your anecdotal experience.

[dae]

33. My real-life experiences are hardly anecdotal and i have suffered from

sleep apnea and used a CPAP machine as well.
The statement was, "Fat motorists may be even more dangerous than those who have been drinking".
My problem is "fat-bashing" kurtyboy, I don't like it and from the looks of some of these posts, there are some ready to pounce. I guess we all have our prejudices.
So, I repeat, it is a crock of shit.

[kutastha]

35. just out of curiosity...

How did your sleep apnea go away?

[dae]

36. Used a CPAP for about two months solid, then on and off another three

months. No problems in 18 months.

[Roon]

41. I too use a C-Pap

Although I am about 20 pounds overweight now, I had sleep apena even when I was thin. I love my C-Pap. I call it my dream machine because it allows me to get to the REM stage, which is needed to get restful sleep.

[Exultant Democracy]

11. This makes no mention of the fat and drunk

Using the same rigorously scientific approach, that was used in crafting this excellent article, I have found that the Fat and drunk are by far the safest drviers, because they fall alseep before they get into their cars. So if you are going to drink, please don't get a good nights sleep the night before.

[R Hickey]

15. My bony-ass has conquered sleep-apnia by taking naps

I have no health insurance, but I do have some control over when I'm working, so I can take naps.

I have three friends with sleep apnia who I've consulted with. One is somewhat fat, two aren't. Two have those breathing devices, and one has a cheap plastic nose-band-aid-like thing that, he says, seems to broaden his nostrils, making it easer to breath while he sleeps.

I never tried the cheap nose-band-aid thing, and since I cannot afford to spend thousands for one of those overpriced fancy air-pumping, breathing masks, I have found that taking a nap during the day helps solve the problem.

My increased awareness of my condition has also made me much more watchful of my alertness, so as to avoid situations where I would be driving while drousy.

[morningglory]

17. Having sleep apnea makes you feel like crap all the time.

Food gives you a little energy and lift when you feel like crap.

[demnan]

19. So now are the insurance companies

going to make sure everyone is tested for sleep disorders, and that it is covered under health insurance? Sounds like that wouldn't be a bad idea and would be fair to the fat as well as the thin.

[BiggJawn]

20. Oh, they'll "test", alrighty....

And then use the results of that testing to DENY coverage.
And if you're already covered? Well, they have a study that shows it's congenital, so it's a "pre-existing condition" and you're cancelled.

[NashVegas]

22. "We're All Smokers Now"

By choice or by design, everyone has *something* that puts us in the insurance risk factor pool.

Why people think we'll live forever or have perfect bodies forever is beyond me.

[FlaGranny]

24. My thin 8-year-old grandson

had sleep apnea severe enough to cause seizures. It was caused by huge adenoids. Surgery cured him. Fat may worsen sleep apnea, but there are other causes.

[shanti]

25. oh my

i know someone like this. of course, he doesn't drive anymore because of his sleep apnea. he was very overweight, used to drink heavily, but had a stroke. he was in a coma for about 3 months when he spontaneously woke up, MUCH thinnner, btw, and a non drinker now.

he still has sleep apnea tho. this is a horrible condition for the people that have it and their partners/family. if he sits down or lies down, he falls asleep. he cannot watch a movie, go to a theater. and the snoring - would wake the dead. the snoring ties into the apnea because he would be snoring away and then....nothing. it was like he was holding his breath. then he would sputter and snort and wake up. this happened numerous times nightly.

my heart goes out to people with this condition.

[TeeYiYi]

27. For those of you who suffer from narcolepsy . . .

. . . there is a good drug out there that works. Expensive but good. If you've been diagnosed with narcolepsy your insurance should cover it. The drug is called Provigil. It works in your brain to keep you alert without the jitters caused by other speedy drug options. It is also prescribed for people with MS.

I'm not fat, I don't have sleep apnea and I don't have MS (to my knowledge) but I was having EXTREME trouble staying awake during the day. Literally nodding off with no way to stop it. Whatever the cause, Provigil offered a viable solution and I'm finally back on track. My insurance refuses to pay for it but I buy it anyway. It's worth it. I was losing more money in lost clientele than I lose to paying for this drug.

For those of you who doubt the impaired driving ability of a person who nods off, I'm here to tell you that it is scary as hell. I've fallen asleep behind the wheel of a car so many times I hardly dare tell you. Many times I would wake up in time to avoid something terrible but one time, after waking up in time to pull out of an accident, I fell right back to sleep and ran into the back end of a parked car. I hit it so hard it flipped around and landed on someone's lawn two doors down from where it was originally parked. And this was no small car.

The reason I'm telling this story is so that you will understand that the concerns raised in the title article of this post are real. The headline is rude but the subject matter is serious. I don't believe the article discounts the gravity of drunk drivers on society, on the contrary, it is pointing out another situation that is equally dangerous and needs to be addressed.

TYY

[CheshireCat]

28. Insurance companies do not cover apnea adequately!

My husband has sleep apnea. When he got treatment, it changed his life.

Unfortunately, the insurance company (BlueCross/ BlueShield) only covered a small portion of the treatment. They claimed that the treatment was higher than reasonable. We called every sleep clinic and hospital in two states and found that they were all within a couple of hundred of $$$ of each other. We gave the data to the insurance company. They said that was not how they determined what the cost should be.

Because of the cost, many people can't afford treatment.

[yellowcanine]

29. How about a fat drunk driver?

I have seen a few of those. Scary.

[slackmaster]

34. I'll see your FDD and raise you "...talking on a cell phone"!

:evilgrin:

[skippysmom]

30. What a misleading headline

It should read "Drivers with Sleep Apnea are Worse than Drinkers"

And then it can point out that obese people are more likely to have sleep apnea.

BEING FAT DOESN'T CAUSE BAD DRIVING.

[jpgray]

31. This may be another plan to make fat folks buy diet/supplement crap. (nt)

[shanti]

37. you got it!

i have a friend who's from jamaica. when he first came to the u.s. about 10 years ago, he told me that he was SHOCKED that americans PAID to lose weight!

[Merlin]

32. This is wrong. It should say "Christian Drivers Worse Than Drinkers"

I'm pretty sure they found out that the vast majority of those sleep apnea victims are a member of a Christian religion. So now we know who to blame.

Course, it could also say "Men Drivers Worse Than Drinkers" since 2 out of 3 apnea victims are men.

Or, how about liberals. I'll bet a lot of those apnea folks are liberals. Damn! Better call Limbaugh!

Oh--and by the way--this thread is as preposterous as the article.
:eyes:

[eridani]

38. Have you considered that the link between sleep apnea and fat

might be due to the fact that disrupted sleep and oxygen uptake make you weigh more? Fat actually isn't a risk for anything.

Fat 'fact' takes on life of its own
Paul Campos, Rocky Mt. News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_1213969,00.html
June 18, 2002

An abiding weakness of the conventional wisdom is that, once a supposed fact has become part of that wisdom, it becomes almost impossible to dislodge it. Contemporary journalism contributes to this problem by relying on technologies that help ensure an assertion, once it is repeated enough times, will never be checked against the actual evidence. Consider for example the claim that fat kills 300,000 Americans per year, and is thus the nation's second-leading cause of premature death, trailing only cigarettes. A Lexis database search reveals that this "fact" has been repeated in more
than 1,000 news stories over the past three years alone. Yet the evidence for this claim is so slim as to be practically nonexistent.

As University of Virginia professor Glen Gaesser points out in the forthcoming revised edition of his book Big Fat Lies, the supposed source for this claim was a 1993 medical study that made no such assertion. That study attributed around 300,000 extra deaths per year to sedentary lifestyle and poor dietary habits, not to weight, which was not even evaluated as a risk factor. Indeed the authors of the study, Michael McGinnis and William Foege, became so frustrated by the chronic miscitation of their data that in 1998 they published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, objecting to the misuse of their study.

A year later the journal published an article which actually did assert that obesity causes approximately 300,000 deaths annually. This article, "Annual Deaths Attributable to Obesity in the United States," is a classic example of junk science at its worst. After calculating the death risk associated with various weight levels derived from six epidemiological studies, the authors employed the following assumption: "Our calculations assume that all excess mortality in obese people is due to their obesity" (emphasis added). That was, to put it mildly, a remarkable assumption. As Gaesser points out, "the authors made no attempt to determine whether other factors -- such as physical inactivity, low fitness levels, poor diet, risky weight loss practices, and less-than-adequate access to health care, just to name a few -- could have explained some, or all, of the excess mortality in fat people."

In fact there is a great deal of evidence that such factors are far more relevant to mortality than weight. Indeed, long-term studies conducted at Dallas' Cooper Institute, involving tens of thousands of subjects tracked for a decade or more, have concluded that all of the excess mortality associated with increasing weight is accounted for by activity levels, not weight. These studies show moderately active fat people have far lower mortality rates than thin sedentary people, and essentially the same mortality rates as thin active people. In other words, adding just one variable to the mix -- activity levels -- eliminates fat as a risk factor (The activity levels associated with optimum mortality rates are quite modest -- a brisk daily half-hour walk will by itself put a person in these categories).

Furthermore the 300,000-deaths-per-year figure was derived without taking into account factors such as yo-yo dieting and diet drug use, both of which have been shown to have devastating effects on health. Nor were variables such as class -- poor people die sooner than the well-off -- and social discrimination, which has been shown to have a very negative impact on health, taken into account. In short, the claim that fat causes 300,000 deaths per year should be dismissed as an assertion for which there is essentially no evidence. Journalists in particular ought to start noticing that fact, rather than endlessly reprinting the same piece of junk science.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be contacted at [e-mail].

[classics]

39. A perfect example of completely twisted attack journalism.

Men are 5X more likely to have sleep apnea than women. Not just 10% like a fat person, but 500% more likely.

Men should be banned from the roads.

I can testify to the truth of this becuase I was once a man. True story.

[gate of the sun]

40. got a ticket for DWO, driving while obese... you might see me doing

community service along the side of the road... you can't miss us they give us all chartruese moo moo gowns...

it's happened before, i think the states got a deal with jenny craig.

[CShine]

42. bump