Association between European languages and OSA in the ESADA cohort

The genioglossus muscle (GG) is critical for diurnal activities such as talking and maintaining open upper airway during sleep. Reduced GG responsiveness during sleep contributes to the development of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). While talking, GG is accurately moved to produce various phonemes. Each language includes phonemes that require specific posterior or anterior GG contractions. As a more trained and responsive GG is protective for OSA, we hypothesized that OSA severity might be conditioned by the language spoken. In the European Sleep Apnea Database (ESADA), an ERS supported CRC, we evaluated the association between OSA severity and linguistic strains. <bold>Methods:</bold> We divided the ESADA cohort into language families according to the standard phylogenetic taxonomy, identifying 4 groups: Romance (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian) 22%, Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic) 27%, Slavic (Slovak, Czech, Croatian, Polish) 21%, other (Greek, Altaic, Finnish) 30%. OSA severity, evaluated as apnoea hypopnoea index (AHI), was compared among these strains. The impact of age, gender and body mass index (BMI) was also evaluated. <bold>Results:</bold> 40328 subjects speaking 17 languages were included (age 54 [44-63] yrs, BMI 31 [27-36] Kg\m2). The Germanic family presented a significant lower AHI (15\h [5;32]) compared to the other families (Romance 29\h [15;49], Slavic 29\h [14;52] and other 29\h [13;53]). Results remain consistent after adjusting for age, BMI and gender. <bold>Conclusion:</bold> Predominant Germanic language includes more posterior phonemes and is associated with almost 50% less OSA severity. Our data suggests that posterior phonemes may train the GG as a preventive measure for OSA