The people, who are obese and having the habit of snoring should be cautious more than earlier as a recent study has added another disease behind the Obstructive Sleep Apnea (a disease in which the respiration disturbs due to an enlarged muscle of neck sticks in the wall of throat and obstruct the respiration); it is memory loss.
The researchers from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) along with researchers from Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Science (SGPGI), Lucknow, have found in a joint study that OSA suffers tissue loss in the brain regions that store memory.
Describing the region behind this memory loss, Ronald Harper, the principal investigator and professor of neurobiology at UCLA said, “The impaired breathing during sleep can lead to a serious brain injury that disrupts memory and thinking.”
The research team has scanned the brains of 43 OSA patients for their study using Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) to opt high-resolution images of entire brain and found that a small size of mammillary bodies make the difference between the normal person’s brain and the patient’s brain.
In the OSA patients, the mammillary bodies were almost 20% smaller in size, especially on the left side when the scanned images were compared to 66 control subjects.
“The fact that patients’ memory problems continue despite treatment for their sleep disorder implies a long-lasting brain injury,” said Dr. Harper.
While Indian researcher, Rajesh Kumar, assistant researcher in neurobiology department, SGPIMS who was also one of the lead members of research team said in this regard, “The findings are important because patients suffering memory loss from other syndromes, such as alcoholism or Alzheimer disease, also show shrunken mammillary bodies.”
The research study is going to publish at June 27, the June edition of journal ‘Neuroscience Letters’.
Sleep apnea is a dangerous disease and occasionally occurs when a blocked airway repeatedly interrupt the sleeper's breathing for 10 seconds, at least five times per hour of sleep.
If it is not treated on time, it can lead high blood pressure, brain stroke, heart attack and ultimately death. It also increases risk of diabetes, impotency, irregular heartbeats and accidents during driving because of extreme daytime sleepiness. The Surgery is the final treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnea, which is done by the ENT surgeon.
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