Impaired breathing during sleep can disrupt memory and thinking

Researchers say new data from brain image scans shows that patients who suffer from sleep apnea experience loss of brain tissue in the memory storage areas of the brain.

When someone suffers from sleep apnea, their breathing is periodically stopped by muscle and other types of tissue. These pauses in breathing can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Many times, they happen between five and 30 times each hour, and in some severe cases even more often. After the breathing pause is over, normal breathing resumes, occasionally with loud snorting or choking sounds.

For most sleep apnea sufferers, it is a chronic ailment that interrupts your sleep three or more nights every week. When one is suffering from sleep apnea, he or she typically moves from deep sleep to light sleep whenever a breathing pause occurs.

"Our findings demonstrate that impaired breathing during sleep can lead to a serious brain injury that disrupts memory and thinking," principal investigator Ronald Harper of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles said.

Harper and his team used a technique called magnetic resonance imaging to gather high resolution pictures the 43 patients’ brains, including cross sections of mammillary bodies. Mammillary bodies are clumps of tissue on the underside of the brain, and are so named for their resemblance to breasts. The researchers compared the results to pictures from 666 control subjects matched for gender and age.

Harper and his team, who published their findings in the journal Neuroscience Letters, found that in patients who suffered from sleep apnea, the brain’s mammillary bodies were nearly 20 percent smaller than the control group’s.

"The findings are important because patients suffering memory loss from other syndromes, such as alcoholism or Alzheimer disease, also show shrunken mammillary bodies," study lead author Rajesh Kumar said.

Sleep Disorders

Dyssomnias

Parsomnias

"It’s been a hard day’s night
I’ve been workin´ like a dog
It’s been a hard day’s night
And I’ll be sleepin´ like a log…. "

(John Lennon and Paul McCartney)