Increased Prevalence of Sleep-Disordered Breathing among Professional Football Players

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Abstract
Sleep-disordered breathing is a clinical disorder consisting of apnea and hypopnea during sleep; it affects about 4 percent of the general population.1 We examined sleep-disordered breathing in a group of National Football League players. We used a value of 0.5 on the multivariable apnea-prediction index, on the basis of data from eight randomly selected teams, to stratify players according to the risk of sleep-disordered breathing (high or low).2 Players from both risk groups were randomly selected for overnight polysomnography, with oversampling from the high-risk group. Of a total of 302 players who could be evaluated (mean [±SD] age, 25.5±2.7 years; body-mass index [the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters], 31.5±4.6), 52 players gave written informed consent for full overnight polysomnographic studies. We used a conservative apnea–hypopnea index cutoff value of 10 to define sleep-disordered breathing.3

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