Nighttime breathing pauses impair sleep stages, which play an essential role in brain function.
People who suffer from sleep apnea, a disorder that can cause breathing to stop, may be at greater risk of memory loss and cognitive problems, suggests a study recently presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, which took place in April in Denver (United States). According to the authors, the result reinforces the importance of correctly diagnosing the disease.
Apnea is a disease characterized by breathing pauses during sleep that lead to a drop in oxygen saturation in the blood and cause nocturnal micro-awakenings. As some of these episodes are short-lived, the person is often not aware of them or remember waking up. But these awakenings cause sleep fragmentation.
The study presented at the congress involved 4,257 people, who answered a questionnaire from National Health and Nutrition Examination, providing data on sleep quality, with questions related to snoring, pauses in breathing, the sensation of waking up without air, and difficulty with memory, concentration or mental confusion. After adjusting for factors that can affect memory, such as age and educational level, researchers found that those who had apnea symptoms were 50% more likely to have memory problems.
One of the limitations of the work is that it did not use polysomnography exams to diagnose apnea. Although the study does not indicate a cause-and-effect relationship, the association between respiratory pause and cognition makes sense, experts say.
“Apnea causes a change in sleep architecture, which is the distribution of sleep stages throughout the night. Fragmented sleep alters these stages, generally resulting in a reduction in the deeper ones, which play an important role in brain function, memory formation and learning capacity.”, says neurologist and sleep medicine specialist Maira Honorato, from Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein. Furthermore, the drop in oxygen saturation directly affects brain function.
Apnea also impairs another important function of sleep, which is the activation of a “brain cleaning” process, the glymphatic system, which drains toxic waste from the central nervous system.
Apnea is more common in men
Among the risk factors for developing apnea are:
- be male;
- advanced age;
- obesity;
- cranial malformation and retrognathia (the position of the jaw in which the chin is left behind).
The disease causes nocturnal symptoms (snoring, pauses in breathing, waking up short of breath or several times at night) and daytime symptoms (drowsiness, tiredness, difficulty concentrating and memory problems).
Treatment depends on the severity, the patient’s age and the presence of factors such as cranial malformation and includes the use of CPAP (a device used for sleeping that generates pressure in the airways through a mask), orthognathic surgeries, speech therapy sessions and dental treatment, with the use of a mandibular plate, in addition to lifestyle changes.
With information from Einstein Agency.
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