MIT: Obstructive
sleep apnea, which causes people to briefly stop breathing while
asleep, affects an estimated 5 percent of the population, not including
the many more who don’t even realize they suffer from the disorder. Patients are sometimes treated with a machine that blows air into the
patient’s airway through a face mask, but no drug treatments exist. In
an advance that may change that, MIT researchers have discovered that a
dietary supplement called yohimbine reverses the root cause of
obstructive sleep apnea in an animal model.
