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OBSTRUCTIVE SLEEP APNOEA: THE GENESIS OF DAYTIME SOMNOLENCE AND COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT - AROUSALS, HYPOXIA AND CIRCADIAN RHYTHM

Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA) is a disease characterised by repetitive upper airway obstructions which are manifest by desaturation and arousal from sleep. It has been known for many years that this interruption to the normal architecture of sleep may present to the clinician as excessive daytime somnolence often with a complaint of difficulties with concentration and short term memory. Previous work had demonstrated a relationship between variables of cognitive dysfunction in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea, however, little was known about which components of the syndrome contributed to this outcome and whether specific clinical thresholds of sleep disordered breathing could be defined for the development of cognitive dysfunction. In the context of this body of work cognitive dysfunction is defined as: a level of cognitive performance below normal derived values for a given cognitive test, when the subjects performance is controlled for age, sex and level of education.

  1. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/382
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/215942
Date January 1997
CreatorsJOFFE, David
PublisherUniversity of Sydney, Respiratory Medicine, Royal North Shore Hospital
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish, en_AU
Detected LanguageEnglish
RightsCopyright JOFFE, David;http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html

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