2023-05-10 12:20:00
No one misses the cognitive decline. It is essential with age. He begins from 45 years old. It corresponds to an alteration of one or more cerebral functions. Concretely, the memorythe ability to reason and understand begin to decline. This phenomenon can be manifested by a progressive decline in memory and executive functions.
Researchers from the UK, Germany and Australia have shown for the first time that obstructive sleep apnea can promote early cognitive decline, even in healthy patients. The results are published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Sleep.
Sleep apnea is characterized by a temporary suspension breathing at night. In France, the syndrome affects 4% of the population.
THE symptoms common ones include restless sleep, loud snoring, daytime sleepiness, and prolonged morning headaches.
Participants with sleep apnea have poorer memory
“We show weaker executive functioning and visuospatial memory et deficits in alertness, attention sustained and psychomotor and impulse control in men with sleep apnea. Most of these deficits had previously been attributed to comorbidities,” said Dr Ivana Rosenzweig, a neuropsychiatrist who heads the Sleep and Brain Plasticity Center at King’s College London and is the study’s lead author.
The study was conducted on a group of 27 men aged 35 to 70affected by sleep apnea, but without comorbidity. These patients are relatively rare, as most men and women with sleep apnea have comorbidities such as cardiovascular and metabolic disease, diabetes, or depression. The men were not smokers or alcoholics and were not obese. We know that being overweight is a major risk factor for sleep apnea.
By conducting research on healthy people, scientists wanted to prove that sleep apnea could be deleterious for the braineven if you are no medical history.
The brain waves of sleeping subjects were measured by electroencephalography (EEG), while their blood oxygen levels, cardiac frequencytheir breathing, and eye and leg movements were tracked.
The results showed that patients with severe sleep apnea had alertness, executive functioning, visual recognition memory in the short term and social and emotional recognition weaker than the others. Patients with mild sleep apnea performed better in these areas.
“The most significant deficits…were demonstrated in tests that assess both simultaneous visual matching ability and short-term visual recognition memory for non-verbal schemas, tests of executive functioning, and change of attentional whole, in alertness and psychomotor functioning, and finally, in social cognition and emotion recognition,” the authors wrote.
Cognitive deficits: they would be due to an intermittent low oxygen content
Researchers are unable to explain how sleep apnea can accelerate cognitive decline. The authors hypothesized that the cognitive deficits are due to intermittent low oxygen and high carbon dioxide in the blood, changes in blood flow to the brain, sleep fragmentation, and neuroinflammation in patients.
“This interaction complexe is still poorly understood, but it is likely to lead to widespread neuroanatomical and structural changes in the brain and associated functional cognitive and emotional deficits,” said Dr Ivana Rosenzweig.
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