[Prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome in professional drivers and the relationship with traffic accidents].

To study the prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) and its relationship with traffic accidents in the professional drivers. Questionnaires of OSAHS were sent to 950 professional drivers who had annual physical examination at the Central Hospital of Jiading District in Shanghai from October 2014 to September 2015. Those with moderate to severe snoring and/or Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS)≥9 performed the home sleep testing. All drivers were divided into OSAHS and non-OSAHS according to the survey and monitoring. The following parameters were compared such as driving ages, neck circumference, body mass index (BMI), average night sleep time, ESS, hypertension, diabetes, hypertrophy of tonsil and the incidence of traffic accidents. The risk factors of traffic accidents were analyzed by multivariate Logistic regression. Totally 826 responses were eligible, including 578 (70.0%) with self-reported snoring. There was measurement failure involving 3 of 233 the home sleep testing due to sensor off, 823 subjects were included in the study. The prevalence of OSAHS was 13.5% (111/823). The mild, moderate and severe OSAHS were 47, 38 and 26 cases respectively. There were 712 drives without OSAHS. The neck circumference[(39.8±3.8) vs (39.0±3.0) cm]and BMI[(26.7±4.2) vs (24.4±3.8) kg/m]were significantly higher in the drivers suffering from OSAHS (all <0.05). The percentage of ESS≥ 9 (57.7% vs 12.6%), hypertension (27.9% vs 5.9%), diabetes (4.5% vs 1.1%), hypertrophy of tonsil (7.2% vs 2.3%) were higher in the drivers with OSAHS (all <0.05). There were no significant difference in driving ages and average night sleep time between two groups (all >0.05). The overall incidence of traffic accidents was 5.8% (48/823) in a year. The percentage was respectively 17.1% (19/111) in OSAHS and 4.1% (29/712) in non-OSAHS (<0.001). Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that sleepiness (=30.578, 95% 10.699-87.394; <0.001), OSAHS (=14.062, 95% 4.791-41.269; <0.001) and vehicle years (=2.345, 95%: 1.183-4.646; <0.05)were the risk factors, while the average night sleep time (=0.037, 95%: 0.014-0.098; <0.001) was the protective factor. Professional drivers have higher prevalence of OSAHS, which contributes to the increased risk of traffic accidents.