A possible new approach to stopping obstructive sleep apnea

Thursday, February 23, 2017 - 10:31 in Health & Medicine

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. Yohimbine, a chemical derived from the bark of the African yohimbe tree, has a long history of use by humans as an aphrodisiac, and more recently it has been used by bodybuilders to burn fat. It is not FDA-approved for any of these uses, however. Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), says that while the results of...

Read the whole article on MIT Research

More from MIT Research

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net