How Service-Connected Weight Gain and Secondary Sleep Apnea Could Tie Your VA Disability Claims Together
Everybody who enlists or commissions has a personal motivation for joining the military. Your reasons are your own, but the time you spent in the armed forces is a public service that deserves more than a commendation. If you’ve sacrificed your physical health or your mental well-being for your country, you’re supposed to receive the support you need to live as independently as possible.
Don’t let weight gain and potentially related sleep apnea prevent you from asserting your right to VA physical disability benefits. Read more to learn how weight gain could affect your claim.
Your Service, Your Sacrifice, and Your Benefits
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is tasked with ensuring that every injured, disabled, or ill veteran receives the care and the compensation they deserve—but, as most servicepeople already know, the VA all too often falls short of its mission.
The VA’s Promise…
Almost every veteran who’s been diagnosed with a service-connected condition is eligible for some form of disability pay. In the vocabulary of the VA, a service-connected condition is one of any diagnoses that can be traced back to your active military service.
You’re eligible for benefits as long as you meet the following criteria:
- You’re diagnosed with an illness, an injury, or another condition that affects the body or the mind.
- You served on active duty, active duty for training, or inactive duty training.
- You were injured while serving in the military or your military service made a pre-existing condition worse or you have a service-related disability that only became evident after you left the armed services.
…and Why Filing a Claim Isn’t Always Easy
Although the VA employs generous definitions that apply to most veterans, federal law requires the VA to perform due diligence before approving claims and paying benefits. Since conditions like weight gain and sleep apnea aren’t typically considered presumptive, most applications for disability benefits must be supported by strong evidence of a so-called “service connection.”
Completing and filing government paperwork can be an exercise in frustration for anyone—let alone a veteran who knows they’re hurt, understands how they’ve been injured, and has no doubts about their eligibility for benefits.
But federally mandated standards and slow processing times can make even the simplest claims complex. Evidence is difficult to obtain, records go missing, and claims—even when approved—aren’t always rated to the level you deserve.
You can’t control how the Department of Veterans Affairs treats your claim, but knowing more about how it views service-connected weight gain and sleep apnea could help you build a stronger, more compelling case for disability pay.
Bridging the Gap Between Weight Gain and Sleep Apnea
The VA puts weight gain and sleep apnea in two very different categories. Although weight gain, obesity, and similar conditions aren’t typically eligible for disability pay, they can serve as an “intermediate step” between a primary disability and a secondary service-connected condition.
What You Need to Know About Service-Connected Weight Gain
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity and weight gain affect veterans at far higher rates than the general public. In a recent series of studies, the CDC found that, whereas 35% of the U.S. population can be categorized as obese, more than 78% of veterans meet the criteria to be classified as either overweight or obese.
Researchers working with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have already homed in on a common-sense hypothesis: many servicepeople returning from combat, overseas deployments, or intensive stateside training are at-risk for service-connected conditions like PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Others may have suffered serious physical injuries that limit their mobility and make it more difficult to exercise and lose weight.
In either case, mental health conditions and serious physical disabilities might cause and aggravate weight gain—giving obesity an obvious service connection, even if the VA doesn’t have a diagnostic code for it.
What You Need to Know About Service-Connected Sleep Apnea
Sleep apnea is a common but potentially serious sleep disorder. Diagnoses typically fall into any one of the following categories:
- Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which can occur when the muscles at the back of the throat relax and block the inflow of air to the lungs.
- Central sleep apnea (CSA), caused by the brain’s failure to send the right signals to the muscles that control your breathing.
- Treatment-emergent central sleep apnea, or complex sleep apnea, which is an OSA treatment-related complication.
People with sleep apnea start and stop breathing at abnormal intervals throughout the night but may not realize that something is off about their sleep patterns. Even when symptoms are noticeable, they’re often vague and difficult to pin down—waking up with a dry mouth, for instance, or having a hard time paying attention while awake.
Difficult as it may be to detect and diagnose, untreated sleep apnea could put you at risk for:
- High blood pressure
- Cardiac arrest
- Type 2 diabetes
- Chronic liver trouble
- Relationship problems
The VA currently rates sleep apnea between 0% and 100%.
How Weight Gain Can Cause Sleep Apnea
Weight gain can cause and exacerbate sleep apnea. This is because:
- More weight may cause larger fat deposits to accumulate around the face, neck, and throat—putting more pressure on your upper airway and making it more difficult to breathe.
- Obesity can change the way your body regulates its hormones and responds to inflammation, making it much harder to control breathing during sleep. These changes, even when subtle, can increase your long-term risk of developing conditions like OSA.
- In general, people who are overweight or obese are much more likely to be diagnosed with sleep apnea than people with lower BMIs.
Why You Can’t Cite Obesity in Your Claim Without Being Prepared
Medical professionals know that obesity is a leading risk factor for sleep apnea. However, because obesity isn’t a rated condition, it can’t be used to obtain benefits for secondary service-connected sleep apnea.
To be eligible for disability pay, you’ll need to meet all three of the following criteria:
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You must have been diagnosed with a primary service-connected disability that caused your weight gain or obesity.
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Your weight gain or obesity either caused your sleep apnea, or, if you had sleep apnea before joining the military, made it worse than it otherwise would have been.
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You would not have sleep apnea if not for the obesity caused by, or aggravated by, your primary disability.
In other words, you may be entitled to secondary disability benefits for sleep apnea if—and only if—your weight gain is a plausible and likely result of a disability with a more direct service connection.