Background: Sleep complaints are prevalent in older patients. Sleepiness, short or long sleep duration and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are associated with insulin resistance (IR). These parameters have not yet been considered together in the same study exploring the possible association between IR and sleep in older patients. IR is involved in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, pathologies which are highly prevalent in older patients. Here we assess, in older non-diabetic patients with sleep complaints, the associations between IR and sleep parameters objectively recorded by polysomnography (PSG) rather than self-report. The Growth Hormone/Insulin like growth factor-1 axis could play a role in the development of IR during sleep disorders. The second objective of this study was to analyze the association between sleep parameters and age-adjusted IGF-1 score, which could explain the association between OSA and IR.
Methods: 72 non-diabetic older patients, mean age 74.5 ± 7.8 years, were included in this observational study. We evaluated anthropometric measures, subjective and objective sleepiness, polysomnography, Homeostatic Model Assessment for IR (HOMA-IR) and age-adjusted IGF-1 score. A multivariate regression was used to determine factors associated with HOMA-IR.
Results: The 47 OSA patients were over-weight but not obese and had higher IR than the non-OSA patients. In multilinear regression analysis, apnea-hypopnea index was independently associated with IR after adjustment for several confounding factors. Neither IGF-1 level nor IGF-1 score were different in the two groups.
Conclusions: We demonstrate that in non-diabetic older patients with sleep complaints, OSA is independently associated with IR, regardless of anthropometric measurements and sleep parameters (sleep duration/sleepiness/arousals). Targeting OSA to reduce IR could be useful in the elderly, although further exploration is required.