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We all have cause to take climate change personally. Not only do higher temperatures lead to such mega-events as droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and floods, they also affect human health—exacerbating asthma, allergies, cardiovascular disease, the spread of water-borne pathogens, and more. Now, it appears that a warming world affects us in one other, potentially life-threatening way. That’s according to a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper presented May 18 at the 2025 gathering of the American Thoracic Society in San Francisco. Researchers found that as the heat increases, so too does the incidence and severity of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), increasing the risk of hypertension, heart attack, stroke, and death.
“We were surprised at the magnitude of the association between ambient temperature and OSA severity,” said Bastien Lechat, the lead author of the paper and a senior research fellow at South Australia’s Flinders Health and Medicine Research Institute, in a statement that accompanied the recent presentation. “This study really highlights the societal burden associated with the increase in OSA prevalence due to rising temperatures.”
In order to conduct their work, Lechat and his team collected data from 125,295 users of an under-mattress apnea sensor, in 41 countries, gathering readings recorded from January 2020 to September 2023. The sensor consists of an inflatable mat positioned beneath the point of the mattress that is at chest level with the sleeper. Changes in the air pressure within the mat record bodily, respiratory, and even cardiac motion. “By analyzing these signals with proprietary machine learning … the device can estimate a range of metrics, including sleep duration, sleep stages, awakenings, and periods of breathing cessation,” Lechat said in an email to TIME. Those cessations in breathing are what constitutes apnea.
The researchers collected a median of 509 nights of readings from each…
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