How Sleep Apnea Alters Your Brain

Sleep apnea has been connected to several serious conditions, such as obesity, heart disease, stroke, and dementia.

How exactly does sleep apnea cause these diseases, and what can you do to prevent it?

A new study in the journal Neurology reveals exactly how sleep apnea damages your brain and what you can do to stop it.

The authors wanted to see exactly what brain changes occur in people with sleep apnea and in people who spend very little time in deep, slow-wave sleep. This is very common in sleep apnea patients.

Sleep apnea is a condition in which a person’s breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, leading to less oxygen reaching the brain and to poorer quality sleep than in people without sleep apnea.

The study involved 140 people, all suffering from this condition. They were initially recruited by the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging. None of them had dementia, and an MRI scan of the brain and a sleep study were offered to all of them.

The scientists’ main focus was on changes in the white matter of the subjects’ brains. White matter is the part of the brain that contains nerve fibers. Its health is crucial as it helps different parts of the brain communicate with each other.

They looked at two markers of white matter health: white matter hyperintensities (small lesions or damaged areas seen on brain scans), which often increase with age or uncontrolled high blood pressure, and the integrity of axons (nerve fibers that connect nerve cells).

This is what they found.

1. White matter hyperintensities and axonal integrity were more prevalent in participants with severe sleep apnea.

2. There was an increase in the quantity of white matter hyperintensities comparable to the effect of aging 2.3 years and a drop in axonal integrity comparable to aging 3 years for every 10-point decrease in the proportion of slow-wave (deep) sleep.

3. Participants with severe sleep apnea had higher volumes of white matter hyperintensities and reduced axonal integrity than those with milder sleep apnea.

Thus, if you have sleep apnea, there is a good chance that your brain is suffering physical damage to the tissue that allows different brain regions to communicate. It is not surprising that sleep apnea has been linked with everything from stroke to cognitive decline to Alzheimer’s disease.

The scariest thing is that there is no medical treatment for these changes in the brain, so once they have happened, they are there to stay.

There is, however, a natural way to rebuild your brain by loading it up with one free ingredient, as explained here…

If you suffer from sleep apnea, you must start healing it right now, before the damage done to your brain is irreversible. Fortunately, you can cure snoring and sleep apnea in as little as three minutes using the simple throat exercises found here…