Specialists in sleep and aviation medicine have revived a controversial proposal to screen extremely obese pilots for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and to treat those who are found to have the disorder.
OSA is “strongly associated with impaired cognitive performance and daytime performance,” a team of sleep specialists said in a report that was approved as a position paper of the Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA).1
In turn, the report said, “There is a very strong relationship between elevated BMI [body mass index, a gauge of body fat that takes into account a person’s height and weight] and presence of sleep apnea” (see “Calculating BMI”).
The report, published in the September issue of AsMA’s Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, said that OSA screening should be required for pilots whose BMIs are in the “morbidly obese” category — that is, those with a BMI of at least 40. That would mean, for example, a 6-ft-tall (2-m-tall) pilot w…
