Lee et al. recently published an article in the journal of Sleep looking at alterations of brain network connectivity in adults with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) using fractional anisotropy (FA) analysis. They felt that for patients with OSA; abnormal networks could mediate clinical functional deficits and reflect brain tissue injury.
They assessed 165 healthy controls and 135 OSA patients. They looked at global network properties and regional efficiencies between the groups. Differences between groups of interest were noted in global network properties (p-value < 0.05, corrected), and regional efficiency (p-value < 0.05, corrected) in the left middle cingulate and paracingulate gyri, right posterior cingulate gyrus, and amygdala. In FA analysis, OSA participants showed lower FA values in white matter (WM) of the right transverse temporal, anterior cingulate and paracingulate gyri, and left postcentral, middle frontal and medial frontal gyri, and the putamen.
Changes in WM integrity and structural connectivity were found to be present in OSA participants, with these changes affecting brain network properties. They suggest that brain network analysis may improve understanding of neurocognitive deficits in OSA, enable longitudinal tracking, and provides explanations for specific symptoms and recovery kinetics.
Citation:
Min-Hee Lee, Chang-Ho Yun, Areum Min, Yoon Ho Hwang, Seung Ku Lee, Dong Youn Kim, Robert J Thomas, Bong Soo Han, Chol Shin, Altered structural brain network resulting from white matter injury in obstructive sleep apnea, Sleep, , zsz120, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsz120
