Sleep Apnea Directly Tied to Early Cognitive Decline
Well, no question about this — I lived it!
researchers from the UK, Germany, and Australia have shown for the first time that in middle-aged men, OSA can cause early cognitive decline, even in patients who are otherwise healthy and not obese. The results were recently published in the journal _Frontiers in Sleep_. “We show poorer executive functioning and visuospatial memory and deficits in vigilance, sustained attention, and psychomotor and impulse control in men with OSA. Most of these deficits had previously been ascribed to co-morbidities,” said Dr. Ivana Rosenzweig, a neuropsychiatrist who heads the Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre at King’s College London, and the study’s lead author. “We also demonstrated for the first time that OSA can cause significant deficits in social cognition.”
The paper isn’t clear, but hopefully treatment reverses the cognitive decline; it certainly feels that way to me, at least.(tags: sleep sleep-apnea cognition brains sleeping science papers)