ES0-004 study help - RES PowerFuse 2010 Basic Updated: 2023

Part of the series “Today’s True Leadership”

One of the questions I hear frequently from emerging and current leaders is this: “How has leadership changed from 10 years ago and what do I need to understand about running a successful enterprise that I don’t know today?

A accurate study attempts to address this question in a fuller way than ever before. Jointly published by DDI, The Conference Board, and EY, the Global Leadership Forecast 2018 is one of the most expansive leadership research projects ever conducted. Integrating data from more than 28,000 leaders and HR professionals at 2,488 organizations around the world, the report offers insight into the state of global leadership and provides evidence-based recommendations for organizations to change their people strategies to meet upcoming challenges.

Evan Sinar, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Vice President at DDI, leads the company’s global research on leadership and people strategies, and shares with us below the key findings from this latest study. DDI is a global leadership company that helps organizations transform the way they hire, promote, and develop leaders at every level.

Here’s what Dr. Sinar shares on the key findings about leadership today:

Kathy Caprino: From this study, what are you seeing as the ways in which leadership overall has changed in the past 10 years?

Evan Sinar: The Global Leadership Forecast 2018 is the eighth edition of the study, which we’ve published every few years going back to 1999. As a general trend, we’ve seen a continued slippage in leadership bench strength (ready-now leaders who can step in to replace those who retire or move on) – in 2018, only 14% of companies have a strong bench, the lowest number we’ve ever seen. More specifically, we’ve seen digital transformation and the constant threat of disruption having a profound impact on leadership at every level.

While not every leader needs to be a technical expert, leaders do need to be able to understand the impact of digital tech on their business and more importantly, predict the impact of technology in the future. They also need to be highly adaptable, hyper-collaborative, and able to leverage data to make better decisions. And

Caprino: What are the 10 most critical findings of this study?

Sinar: In brief, here were 10 of the most important data points that came out of the study:

#1: CEO concerns about talent

CEOs are incredibly panic about the leaders they’ll need to drive enterprise success. Only 14% of CEOs say they have the talent they need to execute their business strategies.

#2: Need for digital leadership skill

Digital leadership skills are becoming increasingly critical. Companies who have the most digitally-capable leaders financially outperform the average by 50%.

#3: Why gender diversity improves profitability

The value of gender diversity continues to be proven.

#4: Develop leadership potential earlier

Organizations need to take a broader view of what it means to have “leadership potential,” and start developing leadership potential earlier in careers. Organizations that extend development of high-potential talent below senior levels are 4.2 times more likely to financially outperform those that don’t.

#5: Value Gen X more

Most companies are overlooking the value of Gen X. As the first generation to grow up with video games, they are nearly as digitally savvy as millennials, but also excel in more conventional leadership skills associated with Baby Boomers, such as building talent and driving execution.

#6: Tech leaders are failing

Four out of ten tech leaders are failing, which is the highest leadership failure rate of any industry. The high failure rate is likely due to the fact that the industry puts little effort into developing its leaders. In fact, 32 percent of tech leaders reported that they never meet with their manager to have performance discussions.

#7: Senior leaders need greater alignment

Leadership is being redefined as a team sport. As companies increasingly rely on teams, we found three areas where it’s critical for senior leaders to be aligned: energy and development passion, future-focused leader skills, and views on company culture. A lack of alignment in these three areas quickly derails a senior team.

#8: HR needs developed skill in “people analytics”

Using data to make decisions about people—known as “people analytics”—is becoming an incredibly important skill for HR. However, only 18% of organizations are managing to implement advanced people analytics.

#9: The 3 cultural shifts needed most 

Organizations need to focus on three cultural factors to Excellerate their leaders’ ability to respond to disruption:

• Inform decisions through data and analytics
• Integrate multiple and diverse perspectives to drive change
• Embrace failure in pursuit of innovation

#10: Do-it-yourself leadership growth doesn’t cut it

Too many organizations are taking a “do it yourself” approach to leadership development, which usually begins and ends with giving leaders access to a generic self-study resources. But what leaders really want is a personalized experience and the opportunity to learn from internal and external mentors and their fellow-leaders.

Caprino: What finding was the biggest surprise and the most controversial (going against what many believe about leadership success today)?

Sinar: One of the most controversial subjects we studied is the impact of performance ratings. Many people dread the annual performance review discussion, which are often focused on ratings. We found that when performance ratings were eliminated, there was a small boost in effectiveness. However, eliminating performance ratings was tied to a sizeable increase in leader quality and bench strength, and also led to more gender diversity in leadership.

It’s somewhat surprising, because eliminating ratings seems to go against the wisdom of making data-driven decisions. But what’s important is not the ratings themselves, but the fact that many organizations replaced ratings with a conversation focused on future development and growth. So regardless of whether you eliminate ratings, leaders should be having more conversations about development.

Caprino: Tell us more about the findings regarding the impact of women in leadership?

Sinar: As we have found in the past, our research showed that having more women in leadership is linked to better financial performance. Organizations that fill at least 20% of senior leadership roles with women and have at least 30% women overall are 1.4 times more likely to experience sustained, profitable growth.

Furthermore, the data showed about why having more women leads to better profitability. It’s not because women necessarily have superior skills. Instead, the key is that the organizations have built inclusive cultures that enable everyone to thrive. Organizations with greater gender diversity reported higher levels of collaboration, higher quality leadership, greater agility, and more likely to experiment in pursuit of innovative approaches.

Caprino: What about the decline in reputation of HR and the changes needed within that field?

Sinar: The biggest reason HR’s reputation is worsening is that HR professionals are struggling to keep up with digital transformation. HR leaders lagged far behind leaders in every other functional area on skills that are key in a digital environment, such as using data to guide decisions and anticipating high-speed change.

Conversely, those HR professionals who are succeeding at applying analytics to their jobs are bringing a lot of value to their employers, and are 6.3 times more likely to report having new advancement opportunities.

The lesson is clear for HR: Gain digital and analytics skills now to boost your own career and be seen as a more strategic and valuable business partner in your organization.

Caprino: According to the study, the impact of mentorship on success for employees and leaders has been significant - what do we need to know about that?

Sinar: Organizations that have a formal mentoring culture have 20% lower turnover, 46% higher leader quality, and can immediately fill 23% more roles immediately. Formal mentoring programs were also associated with greater financial success. They also enable organizations to capture significantly more of their vital knowledge before it gets lost as senior employees retire or leave the organization, a major and growing problem for many companies.

Despite the benefits, only about a third of organizations offer formal mentoring. In fact, six in 10 leaders say they’ve never had a mentor, and a third of senior leaders say they’ve never mentored anyone. The good news, however, is that mentoring is growing among Millennials, with nearly 50% saying they’ve had a mentor. Interestingly, Gen X seems to particularly crave mentorship from outside their organization, which they aren’t getting enough of.

Caprino: What is the impact of having a purpose-driven culture on the success of the organization?

Sinar: In today’s disruptive business environment, people need purpose to drive their work and focus more than ever. In fact, our partner organization EY found in a 2017 study that 96% of leaders said that purpose was important to their job satisfaction. In the Global Leadership Forecast 2018, we found that organizations that operated without a purpose-driven culture, or even a purpose statement, financially underperformed the average by 42%.

In organizations that at least have a purpose statement, twice as many leaders say they get meaning from work, and their energy levels are 60% higher. In truly purpose-driven cultures beyond simply having a statement, leaders weave purpose into the fabric of work.These companies financially outperform the market average by 42%, and a strong culture build on trust, loyalty, and a sense of working toward a common goal.

Caprino: What should every leader and emerging leader take away from this study that will help them succeed at a higher level?

Sinar: No matter what business function you work in, leaders today need to understand the impact of technology on their business. You don’t have to be a technical expert, but you do need to be able to predict both opportunities and potential negative effects of technology.

Part of being a great leader in the digital era also depends on developing other leaders. Success in today’s world depends on how leaders perform as a team. The unpredictable and rapidly changing business landscape means you need to have people with a variety of skillsets and mindsets who can quickly step in to show leadership in response to a variety of challenges. It’s become more important than ever that part of your job as a leader is to be a talent scout and a mentor who develops other leaders.

For more information, visit www.ddiworld.com/glf2018.

To expand your leadership capability and career success, join Kathy Caprino’s Amazing Career Project online course, and tune into her Finding Brave podcast.

Electric vehicles, or EVs, promise to reduce carbon emissions and serve as a tool to help mitigate climate change, but a team of Penn State researchers report there has been little research to determine how equitable the benefits of EVs are and, in fact, whether the technology may unfairly harm some areas and populations.

In a study, the researchers only found 48 papers out of a pool of 9,838 studies that explicitly addressed equity issues of EVs, said Wei Peng, assistant professor of international affairs and civil and environmental engineering, Peng added that the small percentage of papers that addressed equity was telling in itself.

"During that screening process, we began to learn what is overstudied and what is understudied," said Peng, who is also an associate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. "We highlighted in our paper what we saw as the most understudied: making equity more explicit as research and, second, we saw a need to focus on those emerging markets and parts of the developing world where EVs are going to be more important."

Unlike vehicles powered by gasoline or diesel fuel, which produce carbon and other chemicals during the combustion process, the electric motors that drive the wheels of an EV do not produce tailpipe emissions. EV owners charge the batteries that are stored on board the EV, rather than add fuel.

While driving electric vehicles may not emit carbon and other gases that could be harmful to people and the environment, there could be other economic and ecological costs that are not readily apparent, according to the researchers, who published their findings in Environmental Research Letters. For example, power plants that create the electricity to charge the vehicles may rely on systems that produce carbon. These plants may also be located long distances from where the electric vehicles are in use.

The researchers added that the electric vehicles themselves require metals and materials that must be mined and manufactured. These materials are often transported through complex supply chains that stretch across the globe.

"As one example, electric cars are often seen as a positive step towards reducing air pollution in urban areas," said Peng. "However, depending on how the electricity used to charge these cars is generated, it can have unintended consequences. If coal-fired power plants are used to generate the electricity for charging electric cars, then those living near these power plants may suffer from the transition to clean transportation. Additionally, the global supply chain challenges for electric vehicles, such as the need for batteries and steel, raise concerns that maybe we are just shifting emissions and other negative impacts to other countries."

Little work has been done to understand the makeup of populations that may be vulnerable to those impacts, the researchers report.

"One of the things we need to focus on are the effects for air pollution and, in particular, location specific factors," said Jinyu Shiwang, doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering. "For example, there is the distribution of social demographic patterns that will influence the exposure and influence the environmental impacts."

As an example, locations with more older people might be more vulnerable to the health impacts of air pollution compared to places with higher numbers of young people, Shiwang added.

Technologies aimed at improving the environment—often called "clean tech"—are often viewed as universally beneficial. However, the study points toward the need to deeply probe all of possible effects—positive and negative—of these complex technological advances from the lens of equity, said Anna Lee, an undergraduate student in geosciences.

"There is an importance to understanding the intersection between environmental and social issues and also understanding how to better assess equity about the research in a policy setting," said Lee. "As this study shows, equity is definitely a complex issue that involves better understanding the complex intersections between the transport of power and the manufacturing sector and how these equity implications can greatly differ depending on the geographical location, spatial scale and other social demographic factors."

Peng, Shiwang and Lee worked with Anjali Sharma, the first author of the paper, who was a postdoctoral researcher in Peng's lab and is now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology.

The team conducted the literature review by searching for peer-reviewed papers published in English between January 2010—when EV technology began to rapidly emerge—and August 2022. The researchers included papers that quantitatively assessed the distribution of at least one outcome of interest, such as emissions, pollution or health. They also included papers that studied the impacts across different population groups and locations. However, they excluded papers that did not perform a quantitative assessment of the distribution of emission and/or health impacts.

The researchers suggest two areas for future work. First, more information is needed on the pollution and health impacts at a fine spatial scale, in addition to quantifying the impacts on emissions. There is also a need to understand the links between the transportation, power and manufacturing sectors to better understand the region-specific activities and impacts of the whole EV value chain.

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A new study is suggesting that robots with more "charismatic" voices – as opposed to flat, matter-of-fact ones – can help people be more creative. 

Scientists from Denmark found that students who are given a task by a robot with a voice programmed to be more "engaging" and "inspiring" performed better.

These students were also more creative than students who received instructions from an identical robot with a flat voice, according to the findings from researchers in Denmark as published by Frontiers in Communication, a peer-reviewed, open-access science journal. 

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Increasingly, social robots are being used for support in educational settings, as SWNS, the British news service, noted.

But the Danish research team wanted to determine if the sounds emitted by a robot actually affected the students' performance.

While teamwork is a key factor in human creativity, boosting collaboration and new ideas, the researchers said they wanted to understand whether robots using a voice designed to sound charismatic would be more "successful" as creativity facilitators.

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Said Dr. Kerstin Fischer of the University of Southern Denmark, one of the study's authors, "We had a robot instruct teams of students in a creativity task. The robot either used a confident, passionate – i.e., charismatic – tone of voice or a normal, matter-of-fact tone of voice," as SNWS reported.

"When the robot spoke in a charismatic speaking style, students’ ideas were more original and more elaborate."

She went on, "We found that when the robot spoke in a charismatic speaking style, students’ ideas were more original and more elaborate."

Dr. Fischer and colleagues used a text-to-speech function engineered for characteristics associated with charismatic speaking, such as a specific pitch range and a certain way of stressing words. 

Two voices were developed – one charismatic and one less expressive, said SWNS.

The scientists recruited five classes of university students; the students were all taking courses that included an "element of team creativity," as SWNS noted.

A robot speaking on video "led" the workshop. 

Students were told they were testing a creativity workshop, which involved "brainstorming" ideas based on images and then using those ideas to come up with a new chocolate product.

A robot speaking on video "led" the workshop: It introduced the task, reassured the teams of students that there were no bad ideas – and then, afterward, congratulated them for completing the task. 

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It then asked them to fill out a self-evaluation survey, as SWNS noted.

The questionnaire evaluated the robot’s performance, the students’ own views on how their teamwork went – and the success of the session.

Creativity levels of each session were measured by the number of original ideas produced and by how elaborate they were; the researchers measured them as well. 

The group that heard the "charismatic" voice rated the robot more positively, finding it more interactive.

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Their perception of their teamwork was also more positive and they produced more original and elaborate ideas. 

"Our study provides clear evidence for the effect of charismatic speech on listener creativity."

They also rated their teamwork more highly.

But the group that heard the non-charismatic voice perceived themselves as more resilient and efficient, possibly because a less charismatic leader led to better organization by the team members themselves, although they produced fewer ideas.

Study co-author Dr. Oliver Niebuhr, also of the University of Southern Denmark, said, "I had suspected that charismatic speech has very important effects, but our study provides clear evidence for the effect of charismatic speech on listener creativity," as SWNS reported of his remarks.

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"This is the first time that such a link between charismatic voices, artificial speakers and creativity outputs has been found," he also said.

Although the sessions with the robot's charismatic voice were generally more successful, not all the teams responded identically to the different voices. The researchers acknowledged that previous experiences in the students' different classes may have affected their response.

"We would expect that the same stimuli will not yield the same results in all languages and cultures."

The scientists said that bigger studies are needed to understand how external factors affected team performance.

Added Dr. Fischer, "The robot was present only in videos, but one could suspect that more exposure or repeated exposure to the charismatic speaking style would have even stronger effects," as SWNS reported.

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She also said, "We have only varied a few features between the two robot conditions. We don't know how the effect size would change if other or more features were varied."

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"Finally, since charismatic speaking patterns differ between cultures, we would expect that the same stimuli will not yield the same results in all languages and cultures," Dr. Fischer also said, as SWNS reported.

• Research has linked lack of deep sleep to memory issues in people at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
• This isn’t the first study to tie deep sleep to Alzheimer’s risk.
• Experts say focusing on sleep, along with other elements of health, may Excellerate your risk.

For years, experts have spoken about the importance of quality sleep for good health. But new research suggests it may even help lower your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The study, which was published in the journal BMC Medicine, followed 62 older adults who were not diagnosed with dementia and had them do a sleep study. During the sleep study, the researchers monitored their sleep waves with an electroencephalography (EEG) machine and used a positron emission tomography (PET) scan to measure the amount of beta-amyloid deposits in their brains. (Beta-amyloid is a protein that’s linked to memory loss and dementia.)

The researchers found that half of the study participants had high amounts of amyloid deposits. After the sleep study, the researchers had the participants complete a memory game where they matched names to faces.

The researchers discovered that people with high amounts of beta-amyloid deposits in their brains who had higher levels of deep sleep did better on the memory test than people with the same amount of deposits who did not get as good of a night’s sleep. This difference was only seen in people with beta-amyloid deposits—meaning, deep sleep had no effect on people who didn’t have amyloid deposits.

The researchers concluded that deep sleep may help combat memory impairment caused by Alzheimer’s disease and pointed out that this is a modifiable risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. “As such, it represents an intervention possibility that may aid the preservation of cognitive function in the face of Alzheimer’s disease pathology, both present moment and longitudinally,” they wrote.

“With a certain level of brain pathology, you’re not destined for cognitive symptoms or memory issues,” lead study author Zsófia Zavecz, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science, said in a statement. “People should be aware that, despite having a certain level of pathology, there are certain lifestyle factors that will help moderate and decrease the effects. One of those factors is sleep and, specifically, deep sleep.”

But what is deep sleep and why might it help protect against the effects of Alzheimer’s disease? Here’s the deal.

What is deep sleep?

Deep sleep is sleep that’s harder to wake up from, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

When you sleep, your brain goes through different cycles that can be divided into two phases: Non-REM sleep, which features three stages (including two where you sleep deeply); and REM sleep, which happens about an hour or so after you fall asleep and is when you tend to have vivid dreams, the Cleveland Clinic explains.

Your body flips through non-REM and REM sleep when you’re conked out, and a full sleep cycle takes about 90 to 110 minutes. As the night goes on, you have longer REM sleep and less deep sleep.

“Deep sleep generally constitutes about 20% of our night and is usually during the first half of the night,” says W. Christopher Winter, M.D., a neurologist and sleep medicine physician with Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine and host of the Sleep Unplugged podcast. “Deep sleep is important—it can really make a difference in terms of health and staying youthful.”

Why might deep sleep help protect against Alzheimer’s disease?

This isn’t the first study to link deep sleep to a lowered risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. One study published in 2020 that involved some of the same researchers as the latest study analyzed 32 people in their 70s with no memory problems who underwent a sleep study. The researchers used brain scans to monitor levels of beta-amyloid in each person for up to six years and found that those who got less deep sleep had more beta-amyloid build-up.

Research has also linked lack of deep sleep with higher levels of tau, a protein that forms tangles in the brain cells of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

But…why? The theory is that deep sleep helps the brain clear waste products that increase the risk for Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Winter says. Everyone makes beta amyloid protein in the brain during the day but, when you sleep, your brain and related connections usually shrink and flush away beta amyloid and other substances that build up during the day, Dr. Winter explains. The theory is that, if you don’t get good sleep, your brain can’t function well enough to flush away those substances and they build up.

“More specifically, it has a lot to do with the glymphatic system which acts like a pump for removing waste from the brain,” he says. “Research has shown it’s significantly more effective when individuals get more quality sleep.”

Deep sleep “may essentially be a compensation strategy” in people with Alzheimer’s disease or who have high risk of developing the disease, says David Merrill, M.D., Ph.D., an adult and geriatric psychiatrist and director of the Pacific Neuroscience Institute’s Pacific Brain Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. “Deep sleep may help build up your cognitive reserve and clear the brain of disease such as amyloid,” he says. “But at this point, these are hypotheses.”

But it’s important to note that the study didn’t prove that getting good sleep will prevent you from getting Alzheimer’s disease, and the connection between sleep and dementia is still being explored. “Poor sleep leads to difficulty with alertness and awareness,” says Amit Sachdev, M.D., M.S., medical director in the Department of Neurology at Michigan State University. “Patients with Alzheimer’s and poor sleep might be less able to maintain good memory.”

How to lower your risk of Alzheimer’s disease

It’s not exactly known why some people develop Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias and others don’t. However, experts generally agree that doing things like exercising regularly, eating a healthy and balanced diet, and getting good, regular sleep can help.

More specifically, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommends doing these to lower your risk of dementia:

• Try to control your blood pressure.
• Manage your blood sugar.
• Maintain a healthy weight.
• Eat a good mix of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, seafood, and unsaturated fats.
• Strive for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week.
• Keep your mind active by reading, playing board games, or learning a new skill.
• Socialize with family and friends.
• Treat hearing issues.
• Take care of your physical and mental health.
• Try to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night.
• Do your best to prevent head injuries, like wearing shoes with nonskid soles and a helmet while biking.
• Cut back on your alcohol consumption, and have no more than a drink a day (for women) and two drinks a day (for men).
• Avoid tobacco products.

It doesn’t hurt to focus on your sleep, too, Dr. Winter says. “If you have reason to believe that your sleep quality is not good, this is a great time to investigate that,” he says. Dr. Winter recommends asking your primary care physician for a referral to a sleep specialist—not taking a sleeping pill. “People make the mistake of thinking, I’m taking this pill and it’s knocking me out, so I must be sleeping better,” he says. “But it’s just sedating you—it’s not doing what you think it’s doing for your sleep quality—and it may come with its own health risks.”

Dr. Merrill also recommends doing your best to have good sleep hygiene, including creating a regular sleep schedule, doing relaxing breathing techniques on a consistent basis, and avoiding caffeine in the afternoon. “These things have been shown to Excellerate quality of deep sleep,” he says.

Korin Miller is a freelance writer specializing in general wellness, sexual health and relationships, and lifestyle trends, with work appearing in Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Self, Glamour, and more. She has a master’s degree from American University, lives by the beach, and hopes to own a teacup pig and taco truck one day.

CNN  — 

Adults who have obstructive sleep apnea have up to an 75% increased risk, on average, of developing long Covid after a SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with people without sleep apnea, a new study found.

Women with obstructive sleep apnea had up to an 89% increased risk, while men had a 59% higher risk, according to the analysis of electronic health data on nearly 1.8 million people.

Obstructive sleep apnea is a potentially dangerous disorder in which breathing stops for about 10 seconds multiple times during the night due to a blockage of the airways by heavy or relaxed soft tissues in the mouth and throat.

A second analysis of medical records of a smaller group of 330,000 adults found the risk to be only 12%, according to the study, which is part of RECOVER, or Researching Covid to Enhance Recovery. RECOVER is a National Institutes of Health initiative dedicated to understanding why some people develop long Covid and how best to detect, treat, and prevent the condition.

Why the huge difference in numbers? People in the larger study had additional health concerns, or comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, said senior study author Lorna Thorpe, co-lead of the RECOVER Clinical Science Core at NYU Langone Health.

“The range of 12% to 75% is likely due to a combination of different study populations and different levels of comorbidities, but also different definitions of long Covid,” she said. “We didn’t even have a diagnostic code for long Covid until October 2021.

“I believe the risk is likely to be in the middle, but we will need additional studies to tease that out,” added Thorpe, a professor and director of the division of epidemiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

A third analysis of medical records of 102,000 children with sleep apnea found no correlation between sleep apnea and long Covid after the various confounding health conditions were factored out, “which, of course, is great news,” Thorpe said.

“By using three very large networks of electronic health records, we were able to do this study three times, which is one of the strengths of the research,” she added. “This study is the first collaboration of this focus and scale to find that adults with sleep apnea are at greater risk for long Covid.”

This is an “important study” on long Covid, said Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy, a principal investigator of the University of Arizona Health Sciences RECOVER Adult Study and professor of medicine.

“Research needs to be done in a prospective study to verify this association, and if found to be true these findings have implications for treatment of long Covid,” said Parthasarathy, who was not involved in the study.

“It is important to note that some of the symptoms of long Covid such as fatigue may be related to obstructive sleep apnea, and that the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea may Excellerate such long Covid-related symptoms,” he added.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Sleep, is one of a several studies released since Congress allocated $1.15 billion to NIH in January 2021, to study the long-term effects of Covid over a four-year period. To date, the agency says it has used about $811 million to fund research.

Researchers wanted to investigate the role of sleep apnea in long Covid due to the well-known association between the condition and poorer outcomes after a Covid infection.

“People with sleep apnea are at higher risk for a more severe case of Covid-19, admission to intensive care at the hospital and for mortality,” Thorpe said.

“Obstructive sleep apnea can result in increased inflammation, potentially disrupted sleep leading to an increased propensity to develop infections and reduced immunity,” said Dr. Bhanu Prakash Kolla, a sleep medicine specialist in the Center for Sleep Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

“This could potentially explain the pathway by which obstructive sleep apnea leads to an increased risk of having Covid and also … (long Covid),” said Kolla, who was not involved in the study.

Sleep apnea is an underdiagnosed condition regardless of gender, said the University of Arizona’s Parthasarathy.

“It is conservatively estimated that 80% of patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are not diagnosed,” he said. In addition, “an assumption with these analyses is that patients with OSA are likely to be treated. However, nearly half of them are not using the treatment.”

Why would women have up to an 89% higher risk compared with 59% in men? The study did not address that issue.

However, “one can postulate this difference may be based on what we know about sex differences in sleep and immune responses,” said Dr. Phyllis Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

Zee, who was not involved with the new research, coauthored one of the first published studies on the link between sleep apnea and serious Covid infection.

“Women typically have stronger immune responses to viral infections, and thus also vulnerability for post-infection inflammation,” Zee said. “Women in general have more insomnia and with long Covid tend to present with fatigue and insomnia symptoms, which are also common symptoms of long Covid.”

Another reason could be that sleep apnea has historically been considered a male disease, Thorpe said, which could mean that by the time a woman is diagnosed her apnea is more advanced.

“It could be that the women who are documented in electronic health records have more severe sleep apnea because physicians more often look for sleep apnea among men,” she said.

As scientists continue to learn more about long Covid, further information will become available, Thorpe said. In the meantime, people who have sleep apnea — or who snore, snort and stop breathing at night, which are all signs of the condition — should be exceedingly careful when they contact Covid.

“People with sleep apnea who get infected with Covid should seek early treatment and consider getting Paxlovid, the oral medication prescribed to reduce risk of severe outcomes,” Thorpe said. “They should also keep up with their vaccinations to lower the risk of infection in the first place.”