Reducing tongue fat can improve sleep apnea symptoms

OSA is a sleep-breathing disorder characterized by sleep snoring with apnea and daytime drowsiness, which causes sleep disorders and increases the risk of high blood pressure and strokeObesity is a major cause of OSA, so weight loss is also considered an effective treatment for OSAback in 2014, Richard Schwab, director of sleep medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, found that obese people with OSA had significantly larger tongues and a higher percentage of tongue fat than obese people without OSAIn the new study, Schwab led the team to demonstrate that reducing tongue fat can improve OSA symptomsin the new study, 67 obese OSA patients received weight loss treatment, losing an average of nearly 10 percent of their body weight over a six-month period through diet control or bariatric surgeryBefore and after losing weight, they underwent sleep studies and an MRIThe researchers studied the association between weight loss and changes in the upper respiratory tract structure of these participants and changes in the apnea hypoventilation index (AHI)They found that OSA symptoms in these patients improved significantly after weight loss intervention, and quantitative analysis showed that the decrease in tongue fat was closely related to the decrease in AHI and was the main intermediate between weight loss and OSA symptom improvement, the researchers also found that weight loss also led to a decrease in the size of the wing muscles (the jaw muscles that control chewing) and the pharynx sidewall muscles, two changes that also helped improve OSA symptoms, but the effect was not comparable to reducing tongue fatresearchers say tongue fat is a potential therapeutic target for improving OSA, which patients should consider new treatments to reduce tongue fatDo certain low-fat diets do better in reducing tongue fat? Can some effective therapies for reducing fat in other parts of the body, such as the abdomen, be used to reduce tongue fat? These should be the focus of future research in this area.