Australia (Commonwealth Union) – Sleep apnoea is a health issue affecting millions worldwide. A wide variety of health conditions have been linked to sleep apnoea, including heart problems and type 2 diabetes. Scientist at The University of Queensland (UQ) have recently found an association between obstructive sleep apnoea and a higher risk of developing dementia.
Professor Elizabeth Coulson from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute and School of Biomedical Sciences and her researchers saw a causal link between a lack of oxygen to the brain when sleeping and Alzheimer’s in mice, further stating that they saw sleep deprivation alone in mice resulted in only mild cognitive diminishing. “But we developed a novel way to induce sleep-disrupted breathing and found the mice displayed exacerbated pathological features of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Professor Coulson, adding that “It demonstrated that hypoxia – when the brain is deprived of oxygen – caused the same selective degeneration of neurons that characteristically die in dementia.”
Professor Coulson stated that their next move is to determine the amount of hypoxia that leads to brain degeneration in humans and explained that an estimated 50% of elders have obstructive sleep apnoea as throat muscles regularly collapse and obstruct the airway while sleeping making their breathing stop and start.
Presently, the gold standard treatment is a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine, making the airway stay open while sleeping, and allowing oxygen to the brain. “We couldn’t fit CPAP to mice, but we experimentally prevented the hypoxia and this stopped the cognitive impairment and neuron death, and also reduced the Alzheimer’s pathology,” she said, adding that indications are that CPAP treatment of obstructive sleep apnoea bring about the possibility of lowering dementia risk.
Professor Coulson further noted that dementia clinicians found memory improvement for patients who identified and treated sleep issues, but indicated not all persons with obstructive sleep apnoea will end up with dementia.
