INTERRUPTED NIGHT SLEEP MIGHT AFFECT ABILITY TO REMEMBER INFORMATION

Interrupted night sleep worsens ability to remember information Body needs good sleep.Having one’s sleep interrupted sometimes may not be preventable. However, care must be exercised considering the fact that interruption of sleep may affect the brain functions in several ways, including one’s cognitive functions, reports Sade Oguntola For many people, waking them from sleep to attend to any issue is something they do not like. Some say this makes them develop headache, others say that they later find it difficult to go back to sleep. Some mothers too will rather not wake their children up for a late night dinner because it might mean their inability to fall asleep immediately. Sleep interruption sometimes may not be preventable. However, this is an act in which care must be exercised, considering that interruption of sleep may affect the brain functions in several ways, contribute to development of diseases that affect important organs of the body such as the brain, heart and reduce one’s life span. It also can affect one’s cognitive function. Cognition function refers to a range of high-level brain functions, including the ability to learn and remember information: organise, plan and problem-solve; focus, maintain and shift attention as necessary; understand and use language; accurately perceive the environment and perform calculations. The human body works, according to a natural 24-hour sleep-wake cycle referred to as a circadian rhythm, which controls body temperature, sleep/wake timing, and the way our organs and body systems work together. Past research has shown that irregular sleep patterns and shift work take a toll on even the healthiest person over an extended period of time. Experts have linked disruption of an individual’s natural sleep-wake cycle with reduced longevity and demonstrated it can actually cause heart and kidney disease when internal biological clocks in hamsters are out of sync with external rhythm regulators (i.e. light/dark); the heart becomes damaged and enlarged (cardiomyopathy) and the kidney tubules sustain significant scarring. In 2007, researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Centre (SFVAMC) attributed cognitive decline in elderly women to interrupted or fitful sleep when they were younger, in a study that appeared in the July issue of Neurology. Though they said it is not how long they sleep but how well, they speculated that the first and most likely reason is that whatever neurodegenerative condition such as Alzheimer’s disease, is starting to cause cognitive decline, may also affect areas of the brain that govern sleep. While factors entirely, such as brain inflammation or genetic changes, might cause both cognitive decline and sleep disturbance at the same time, but the fact that when you are woken up from sleep in the middle of the night, it may leave you thinking less clearly, has great implications. This is very applicable to many categories of people, including medical doctors on call, emergency personnel and even parents. According to the expert in a study, published in the August issue of the Journal of Biological Rhythms, sleep inertia, the period of grogginess and impaired cognitive performance experienced upon awakening, was nearly four times stronger when people were awoken during the middle of their “biological night” (a period of normal night of sleep) compared to their biological day. The feeling was almost twice as strong during the person’s biological morning, the wake-up period following a normal night of sleep. People also showed the least thinking impairment after awakening during the middle of the biological day. The lead author, Frank A.J.L. Scheer, a neuroscientist in Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Sleep Medicine, in a release from the hospital declared also that, “This is especially important, considering that already following awakening during the morning, the cognitive impairment can be more detrimental than staying awake all night. This has been shown to be comparable to the effects of alcoholic intoxication.” Similarly, the amount of oxygen supplied to the brain may play a role in the relationship between sleep-disordered breathing (SDB such as snoring) and cognitive problems in children some experts also submitted in an American Thoracic Society news release. Dr. Raouf Amin, a professor of paediatrics and director of the division of pulmonary medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre, said in the news release that a history of snoring is a predictor for cognitive deficit in children with SDB. “However, the frequency of snoring(apnea) events during sleep does not predict cognitive deficit and does not correlate with the degree of cognitive deficit. Such a paradox raised the question of whether there are some variables that we do not traditionally measure in the sleep laboratory that might modify the effect of SDB on cognition,” Amin said For this study, which included children aged between seven and 13, the results showed that children that snore had lower regional cerebral oxygen concentration than healthy children. However, children with sleep apnea (usually considered a more severe type of SDB) had higher regional cerebral oxygen concentration than children with just snoring, said the study published in the first issue for November of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. However, Dr Stephen Oluwole, a neurologist at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, said that it is true that one’s quality of sleep can affect one’s cognitive skills, adding that studies have shown that those that have enough sleep are better in school than those who either sleep too much or too little. He said that the body has an optimal number of hours of sleep that it needs. If it is too long, the individual wakes up drowsy and if it is too short, you wake up not feeling fresh. According to the expert, very few people have uninterrupted sleep because most people experience micro awaking. Some individuals wake up and goes back to sleep and would not even remember waking up, some to go and urinate, check for the time, kill a disturbing mosquito and some to pray. However, he declared that the mere fact that you have your sleep interrupted because of a big noise or to read in the night, might not really affect your ability to regain your cognitive function. However, the situation may be different in the case of people, who because of their shift work, have to interrupt their sleep. He said that this would affect their whole body system and not only the cognitive aspect.