The research reveals associations between sleep apnea, deep sleep, and white matter abnormalities, but it can't say whether these sleep differences caused the abnormalities, or if differences in white matter could be interfering with sleep. Separately, people with severe OSA also appeared more impacted by white matter abnormalities than people with mild or moderate OSA. Using polysomnography, meaning the variety of data collected during a sleep study, the researchers found that participants who spent less time in slow-wave sleep appeared more affected by both types of biomarkers in their MRIs. The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain and contains the organ's densest white matter. Changes in this water flow, wrote Carvalho, are related to axon damage and can be an early sign of vascular disease. The second biomarker, called "fractional anisotropy of the genu of the corpus callosum," is related to how water flows through brain cells' wires, or axons. "They represent areas of damage to the white matter." Diego Carvalho, an assistant professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic Center for Sleep Medicine and the senior author of the study, wrote in an email to Live Science. One of the biomarkers that the researchers looked for in brain scans were white matter hyperintensities, "bright spots commonly seen in the white matter of the brain on MRI, which appear with aging and vascular disease," Dr. The overall group was relatively evenly split between people with mild, moderate and severe OSA, and most people had no cognitive impairment during the study. All the participants were screened for one of the two biomarkers, but only 103 were screened for the second, as well. The study included 140 people with OSA whose average age was about 73 years old.
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