Hypoxic burden as diagnostic indicator of obstructive sleep apnea

<bold>Background:</bold> Diagnostic and severity quantification measures of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are limited. Hypoxic burden (HB) appears as a promising parameter for identifying high risk OSA patients and predicting the risk associated to cardiovascular disease mortality. HB pretends to capture total hypoxemia related to sleep respiratory events, measuring frequency, depth and duration of oxygen desaturation due to OSA. <bold>Objective:</bold> Evaluate HB utility as a diagnostic indicator of OSA. <bold>Methods:</bold> Descriptive and transversal study that analyzes OSA patients diagnosed in our hospital in 2023 with home respiratory polygraphy using Sleepware G3 software, which measures HB. Afterwards, HB was related to validated diagnostic indicators for OSA using Spearman’s Rho correlation. <bold>Results:</bold> 83 patients were analyzed. 55.56% were men, with a median age of 53 years. 34.9% smoke. Their main comorbidities were obesity 49.4%, hypertension 48.2%, dyslipidemia 24.1%, type 2 diabetes 8.4% and ischemic cardiomyopathy 1.2%. Epworth average score was 11.3. In polygraphy study, mean of AHI was 33.6/h, mean of CT90 was 13.3%, mean of ODI3% was 30,6 and mean value of HB was 85.06% min/h. After correlating BH with validated OSA markers, there is a positive correlation statistically significant (p<0.05%) in all of them, highlighting stronger correlation with AHI(0.89) and ODI3(0.88), and weaker with CT90(0,55). <bold>Conclusions:</bold> In our cohort, there is a high positive correlation (0.89, 0.88) statistically significant between HB and AHI and ODI3, being poorer with CT90. HB gives additional information in grading OSA, since it joins frequency, duration and depth of intermittent hypoxemia related to OSA. However, more studies are need to a best evaluation of its usefulness.