Central Sleep Apnea + Heart Failure = more article reviews

Hey again, so I just got done reading through another article. This one deals with the benefits of a diuretic, acetazolamide, for patients with heart failure and central sleep apnea. Essentially, what a diuretic does for people with heart failure is it gets rid of some of the excess fluid that accumulates and causes the heart to work harder to pump out the extra volume of fluid. When dealing with central sleep apnea and heart failure, it is important to remember that the heart is already working harder than usual because of heart failure, and if you add in the fact that central sleep apnea causes a decrease in the amount of blood oxygen available, one can see that the heart is going to work even harder to be sufficient. From what I've gathered about this article, the test subjects were given acetazolamide an hour before bed for 6 nights. Lab values that indicate how well their blood was saturated with oxygen showed improvement, while the number of times in an hour the subject woke up from an apneic episode decreased. A miriad of subjective (or opinion-based) perceptions showed improvement in areas such as overall sleep quality, feeling rested on awakening, daytime fatigue, and falling asleep unintentionally during daytime. The article can be found here.  Has anyone with central sleep apnea and heart failure been on a medication like acetazolamide, or other type of diuretic, and experienced the same results?

Mike M., RN BSN
owner of centralsleepapnea.blogspot.com