The effects of continuous positive airway pressure therapy on Troponin-T and N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea: a randomised controlled trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of BNP (Nesiritide), published as a randomized controlled trial.

High-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs Trop-T) and B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-pro-BNP) are sensitive biomarkers for myocardial injury and heart failure respectively.

No randomised controlled trials have examined the treatment effect of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) in patients with OSA on these biomarkers.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Patients >21 years old with apnoea-hypopnoea index (AHI) ≥25/h by overnight polysomnography were recruited.

Eligible subjects were randomised to receive CPAP or sham CPAP for eight weeks each in a crossover design with a wash out period of one month between the treatments.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and crossover study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got BNP (Nesiritide) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both BNP (Nesiritide) and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

The methods mention a period of eight weeks.

Blood samples were collected at 8pm, 3am, and 8am during sleep studies conducted at the end of each eight-week treatment period.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Biomarkers, Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, Coronary Artery Disease, Heart Failure, Natriuretic Peptide, Brain, Polysomnography and Sleep Apnea, Obstructive.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Cardiac biomarkers, Cardiac troponin, N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide and Obstructive sleep apnoea.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and crossover study of BNP (Nesiritide) over eight weeks.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2017 (Sleep medicine), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the BNP (Nesiritide) compound page, all human trials.