Cognition in Patients with Sleep-Disordered Breathing: Can Obstructive and Central Apneic Pauses Play a Different Role in Cognitive Impairment?

Except for verbal fluency and attention, we failed to find any significant association of sleep-related indices with the impairment in different cognitive subdomains. Our data suggest that impairment observed in verbal fluency is associated with a higher proportion of shallow NREM sleep, and attention deficit is associated with higher OAI. Obstructive respiratory episodes seem to play a more important role in cognitive impairment when compared to central ones.