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Snoring, choking, gasping, and pauses in breathing while sleeping: all signs of obstructive sleep apnea, a common disorder thought to affect up to 1 in 5 adults (and 3% of children). Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the throat collapses inward during sleep, resulting in blockage of air flow to the lungs. It often results in people waking up not feeling refreshed despite having gotten a full night's sleep, and to suffer from excessive daytime sleepiness. It also causes a number of health problems, including high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, and negatively affects development, behavior and school performance in kids.
One of the explanations for why behavior and cognitive function are impaired is that the disruption of sleep caused by the repeated episodes of choking leads to repeated arousal from sleep and brings about its fragmentation. This in turn can interfere with different processes which occur in the brain during certain stages of sleep (distinguished from each other by different brain wave patterns and other parameters). It has been shown that sleep is very important for memory and learning, with sleep deprivation negatively affecting both (as those of us who have tried to write an exam after sleeping only three hours the night before know all too well!)
In a study published this week in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, a group of researchers from Germany compared memory performance in 15 adults with obstructive sleep apnea to that in 20 healthy people who served as control subjects. Those with sleep apnea had an average of almost 20 episodes per HOUR in which they choked on their throat and were unable to breathe properly, as compared with 2/hour in the controls. The hypothesis of the researchers was that the sleep fragmentation and disturbances caused by the recurrent difficulties breathing would negatively affect their memory performance. The study found that indeed, people with obstructive sleep apnea had reduced memory performance as compared with the healthy controls, and when their sleep itself was analyzed (all participants underwent a full sleep study as part of the research protocol), it was found, not surprisingly, that those with obstructive sleep apnea had 35% more arousals from sleep, than the controls, more than 22/hour. There also were differences in the quality of the REM sleep seen, with those suffering from obstructive sleep apnea having fewer eye movements than the controls.
The conclusion: if you or someone you know has trouble breathing at night, simply ignoring the problem won't make it go away, but will perpetuate the functional and other health impairments associated with sleep apnea. Instead, it's best to discuss with a physician so that it can be tested for, and treated if present.
Best,
Dennis
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Dennis Rosen, M.D.
Learn how to help your child get a great night’s sleep with my new book:
*Kloepfer et al. Memory before and after sleep in patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnea. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 2009;(5);540-8.
