They flatten their foes on the gridiron, but when it comes to grabbing a healthy rest, football linemen can find themselves sacked by sleep apnea. An Elon professor is now researching the link between body mass in athletes and the harmful sleep disorder, with his findings to be shared in February at a regional conference for sports medicine.
Barry Beedle, a professor of health and human performance, has long believed that the controversial body mass index, of “BMI” for short, is not as inaccurate a gauge of individual fitness as some critics claim. Beedle presented findings on college students and BMI this fall at 60th Annual Convention of the North Carolina Alliance for Athletics, Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance in Greensboro.
BMI is a number devised by the ratio a person’s weight in kilograms divided by their height in meters squared. A BMI between 18 and 24.9 is considered normal, between 25 and 29.9 overweight, and anything over 30 is obese. Beedle believes that the BMI scale, while imperfect, is as close to a uniform measure of different weight classifications as any other.
Critics say it doesn’t take into account various body types, like those of athletes, where muscle mass skews the results to make an otherwise fit person seem overweight.
“There’s no perfect situation,” Beedle said, pointing out that there are also problems with using body fat as an assessment, and that no one classification table for body fat exists. “So what is the lesser of two evils?”
Beedle discovered during his research on college students that only one study had ever been conducted to analyze sleep apnea in athletes. That work looked at professional football players. With the average size of football linemen continuing to grow, Beedle felt additional research was warranted on the long-term effects of size, and to his knowledge, no one has ever studied sleep apnea as it relates to BMI with skin fold and girth measurements.
“A good predictor is anything bigger than 17 inches girth in the neck, a waist that’s greater than 40 inches, or anything in the BMI scale that shows obesity,” he said.
What is known, however, is that body size for someone not involved in sports can play a role in the development of sleep apnea. Previous research has shown that people with higher BMI results may be hypertensive and show excessive sleepiness during the day. At night they awaken because of snoring, stopped breathing and choking sensations.
And sleep apnea itself contributes to other life-threatening conditions like stroke, congestive heart failure and high blood pressure. Beedle argues that America’s growing waistline, athletic prowess aside, makes research into the BMI and sleep apnea link that much more imperative. Where do college football players fall into this? The age and culture in which they live may be masking the sleep apnea that threatens their health.
“It may not always be obvious to them,” Beedle said of the exhaustion college athletes many times experience. “They might say, ‘I’m a college student, I just stay up late at night.’ However, performance may decrease.”
Beedle hopes to expand his research in mid 2008 by examining adult male faculty and staff at Elon.