• Posted June 10, 2026

Women Hit Harder By Sleep Apnea Than Men, Study Finds

Women with sleep apnea tend to suffer from it more than men, even though they wake in the night about as often, a new study says.

Women reported much higher levels of headache, nightmares and needing to go to the bathroom at night due to their sleep apnea, researchers will report at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

They also had worse scores for sleep disturbance, daytime impairment, anxiety, anger, fatigue, depression and brain function, researchers found.

“Across a broad range of atypical symptoms, women uniformly report a greater symptom burden,” said lead investigator Stuti Vaidya, a sleep medicine researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Our results suggest that current algorithms used by clinicians to diagnose and treat patients with obstructive sleep apnea continue to focus on classical symptoms and do not consider the broader range of symptoms women may experience,” she said in a news release.

For the new study, researchers recruited more than 500 people who were starting CPAP to treat moderate-to-severe sleep apnea. About 2 in 5 were women.

Researchers assessed the patients’ symptoms using questionnaires and observed their sleep.

Results showed that women and men had about the same average number of waking events, about 36 versus 40 per hour.

“Women with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea initiating CPAP treatment have similar sleep apnea severity and classical symptoms including snoring, nocturnal gasping and sleepiness,” Vaidya said.

However, women tended to be much more affected by the side effects of sleep apnea, researchers said.

This could mean that women are made miserable by sleep apnea much longer than men before they’re formally diagnosed, Vaidya said.

“Our results suggest that women may not be diagnosed and treated for obstructive sleep apnea until they develop classical symptoms of a severity similar to that seen in men, which may contribute to delays in diagnosis,” she explained.

Vaidya is scheduled to present her findings Monday at the SLEEP meeting in Baltimore.

Findings presented at medical meetings are considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on sleep apnea.

SOURCE: American Academy of Sleep Medicine, news release, June 8, 2026