Wearing a special pump to regulate sleep breathing apparently has no effect on preventing further heart attacks, according to a report in the Volkskrant.

People who have sleep apnoea, a condition where the breathing can stop for more than 10 seconds, and who have had a stroke or heart attack, had been advised to wear a special CPAP mask. The Dutch Apnoea Association says 130,000 people in the Netherlands do this.

But a new large-scale study, presented at a cardiology conference in Rome and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that treating sleep apnoea with the CPAP device does not reduce the risk of a second heart attack or stroke, as had been thought.