Women With This Common Sleep Disorder May Have Higher Dementia Risk

You may already know that sleep and dementia seem to be linked. 

Those who don’t get enough of it, especially in midlife, seem to be at a higher risk of developing the condition, though researchers aren’t exactly sure why. 

Now, a relatively new study has come out that suggests a common sleep disorder that causes loud snoring may increase women’s dementia risk. 

It associates a sleeping disorder called obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), which happens when you temporarily stop breathing in your sleep, with a higher likelihood of developing dementia.

Women seemed to be more affected then men.

How did the study work?

Researchers from Michigan Medicine looked at data from over 18,500 adults, who were over 50 years of age. 

They got the health information from the Health and Retirement Study, an ongoing survey of older American adults.

None of them had dementia at the start of this paper’s ten-year-long study. 

Scientists found that though more men than women had OSA overall, women with OSA were more likely to develop dementia by the age of 80 (4.7%) than men with the condition (2.5%) in comparison to those without OSA. 

This happened across every age level ― actually, women with OSA were more likely than men with OSA to develop dementia as they aged. 

Speaking to News Medical Life Sciences, Dr Galit Levi Dunietz, an associate professor at Michigan University’s Department of Neurology and Division of Sleep Medicine and a co-author of the study, said it may have to do with menopause.

“Oestrogen starts to decline as women transition to menopause, which can impact their brains. During that time, they are more prone to memory, sleep and mood changes that may lead to cognitive decline,” the study author said.

“Sleep apnea increases significantly post-menopause yet remains underdiagnosed. We need more epidemiologic studies to better understand how sleep disorders in women impact their cognitive health.” 

Will I definitely get dementia if I have sleep apnea?

That’s absolutely not what the paper says. It only found a link between the two, and didn’t seek to prove that OSA causes dementia ― it just saw an association, which itself never rose above 5%. 

“This study design [looking at existing health data] cannot fully prove that sleep apnea causes dementia ― that would likely require a randomized trial, over many years, to compare effects of sleep apnea treatment to the effects of no treatment,” the study’s co-author Dr Ronald D. Chervin, director of the Division of Sleep Medicine in the Department of Neurology at University of Michigan Health, said. 

However until such a trial occurs, the study author told News Medical Life Sciences: “The results provide new evidence that clinicians and patients, when making decisions about testing for sleep apnea and treating it, should consider the possibility that untreated sleep apnea causes or exacerbates dementia.”