How Do We Conduct Long-Term Studies to Show Efficacy of CPAP?

“How Do We Conduct Long-Term Studies to Show Efficacy of CPAP?”

This was an excellent Continuing Medical Education (CME) presentation given by Allan Pack and Greg Maislin at the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Seminar Series provided by the University of Arizona College of Medicine Tucson.

In this talk, they presented the importance of including patients with excessive daytime sleepiness in trials to assess outcomes of long-term use of CPAP in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), as well as the biases that have contributed to the negative results of recent randomized control trials (RCTs) to assess the impact of CPAP treatment in patients with OSA on cardiovascular events.

The participants were also able to learn how to conduct studies using propensity score matching when it is not possible to randomize individuals into no treatment.