Waking at Night to Pee?Could It Be Sleep Apnea? What Studies Show

Night-time trips to the bathroom, called nocturia, are often blamed on the bladder. But sometimes the cause is how you’re breathing while you sleep. Obstructive sleep apnea, a common breathing problem during sleep, has been studied as one cause.

The women’s clinic study

At a urogynecology clinic in Toronto, researchers compared 81 women who got up at night to pee with 79 women who didn’t, using a standard questionnaire for sleep apnea risk.¹

	Screened as high risk for sleep apnea
Women with night-time peeing	62%1
Women without	24%1

Higher weight, an overactive bladder and a small bladder capacity were also linked to night-time peeing.¹ The authors recommended screening women with nocturia for sleep apnea.¹ A questionnaire isn’t a sleep test, so this shows risk, not diagnosis.

The bigger picture is mixed for women

A review of 13 studies found people with sleep apnea had about 1.4 times the risk of nocturia, and the risk was highest with severe apnea.² But when the results were split by sex, the link was clear in men and not statistically clear in women.² The range of results for women was wide, so there may simply have been too little data to be sure.

Does treating apnea help?

A review of 5 studies with 307 people compared night-time trips before and after CPAP, the mask machine used to treat sleep apnea.³ Night-time trips and the amount of urine passed at night fell with treatment.³ These were before-and-after comparisons, not trials with a control group.

When to ask about sleep apnea

Consider asking about a sleep assessment if night-time peeing comes with:

• Loud snoring, or a partner noticing pauses or gasps
• Daytime sleepiness
• Higher weight, which was linked to night-time peeing in the Toronto study¹

See sleep apnea after menopause, why you wake up to pee at night and nocturia causes to check.

Try: “I’m up two or three times a night to pee, and my partner says I snore and sometimes stop breathing. Could sleep apnea be part of this, and should I have a sleep test?”

Laugh, Sneeze, Jump covers night-time peeing in Chapter 8, “The Bedroom Chapter,” in a section called “After Dark,” which lists sleep apnea among causes of night waking that have nothing to do with the bladder. Its Three-Day Read, a bladder diary with a bowel column, counts each night-time trip so a clinician can see the pattern. See the book.