Memory Problems: 24% Men Have Sleep Apnea - Reader's Digest

If you ask Cheryl McBride of Sedalia, Missouri, about the time she stopped breathing -- long enough to make her lips turn blue! -- she'll tell you it was a stroke of good fortune.

Really.

Not that she's fond of near-death experiences. But this one turned her life around.

McBride had been feeling anxious, exhausted, and headachy. On top of everything, her memory was going.


It wasn't just that she was forgetting her keys or leaving her purse behind. McBride had taught school for nearly three decades, but a few times in the past several years, she'd gone blank in the middle of a big presentation about her teaching style, even though she'd given it countless times and knew it backward and forward. "It was unnerving," she says.

Everyone past the first blush of youth knows what it's like when a word won't come or a neighbor's name vanishes. An occasional glitch is irritating. More than that can set off a twinge of concern, and a run of significant lapses may have you terrified that you've got Alzheimer's disease. But Alzheimer's is not the only memory marauder around. A surprising number of disorders can leave your steel-trap mind rusty and toothless. That's important to realize, experts say, because many of these problems can be cured and the memory damage reversed -- yet doctors often fail to diagnose them.

Sometimes that's because a sufferer is unaware of key symptoms. McBride, for instance, told her doctor she was concerned about her forgetfulness. But she'd just begun caring for her elderly parents, and her doctor thought the problem might be due to stress; he suggested antianxiety medication. About to leave town for a trip with an old friend, McBride wasn't interested.

In the hotel the first night, Nina Freed quickly learned something new about her longtime pal. "Cheryl snored," she says. "Very loudly. She just snored and snored and snored."

But one night, the snoring stopped. "I looked over at Cheryl, and she wasn't breathing," Freed says. "She was very pale -- blue around the lips. My heart just dropped. I was getting ready to shake the dickens out of her, but then she let out this huge snort."

With that, McBride woke herself up. She was unaware of what had happened until her friend described it, but at Freed's insistence, she recounted the incident to the doctor at her next checkup. The moment she did, the doctor knew what was causing McBride's problems. Like about 24 percent of men and 9 percent of women between the ages of 30 and 60, she had obstructive sleep apnea. Periodically as she slept, the soft tissues at the back of her throat were collapsing and blocking off her airway. Apnea sufferers can experience these episodes hundreds of times a night yet, like McBride, have not a clue.

"You're suffocating," says Carol Ash, DO, medical director of the Sleep for Life program at Somerset Medical Center in Somerset, New Jersey. "But even in your sleep, your brain is aware of this emergency. So it interrupts you and starts you breathing again."

Those starts and stops deprive you of sleep, which is enough to make you forgetful. Even more damaging is the lack of oxygen. According to research published last year, some memory-related parts of the brain are about 20 percent smaller in sleep apnea patients, possibly because brain cells die during nightly apnea episodes.

Luckily, there's an effective treatment. Most often, patients get a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device, which blows air into the nose to prevent the throat tissues from sagging shut. Some users say it makes them feel like a dog with its head out the window, but it does the job: In a 2006 study, nearly 70 percent of patients who used the gadget more than six hours a night found their memory back to normal after three months. McBride has used a CPAP unit since 2007. "I feel so good now," she says. "I've almost forgotten how bad it used to be."
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