Researchers have gotten more into sleep apnea, or more commonly known as snoring, more these days with seeing many different this associated with it. One of these associations is memory loss and daytime fatigue. They studied 43 brain scans of different patients using the MRI which was difficult with all of the bone and fluid close to the mammillary bodies, so these researchers had to manually trace them themselves.
When they had compared these to the 66 controlled matches, the 43 with sleep apnea had 20% smaller mammillary bodies, especially on the left side of the brain.
People who drink a lot have the same problem, giving a bit of a better example of what sleep apnea can cause.
This relates to our class for when we talked about all of the sleeping studies they've done with dreaming and such. I thought it was an interesting study because I wouldn't have thought something so common and unthought of like snoring would affect us so much.
This is a good post. Yes snoring is a rough thing to have to go through if we know people who snore and it interrupts those that are sleeping. But snoring is uncontrollable and the APAP machine can help some with this problem but a lot of people it do not really like to use it. But it does not help. How amazing though something just as small as snoring affects the brain.
ReplyDeleteI honestly didn't know that snoring was considered sleep apnea. My wife has sleep apnea and I know I snore (or so I've been told). Are there different degrees of severity of sleep apnea?
ReplyDeleteWhen you are sleeping and snoring and then quit breathing for a few seconds, it's a good indication that you might have sleep apnea. My sister was driving down the highway, fell asleep and rolled her van. When she was taken to the hospital it was discovered that she has sleep apnea and now uses the APAP machine.
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