Poor sleep puts people with COPD at risk for flare-ups

If you have COPD, new research suggests you might want to pay close attention to getting good sleep.

Poor slumber significantly increased the risk of life-threatening flare-ups of breathing problems in people with the incurable, progressive lung disease, investigators reported.

"Among those who already have COPD, knowing how they sleep at night will tell me much more about their risk of a flare-up than knowing whether they smoked for 40 versus 60 years," said study lead author Dr. Aaron Baugh. He is a clinical fellow at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School and a practicing pulmonologist.

"That is very surprising, and is not necessarily what I expected going into this study. Smoking is such a central process to COPD that I would have predicted it would be the more important predictor in the case of exacerbations," Baugh added.

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