What happens to your brain when you have undiagnosed sleep apnea

Inverse
Sleep isn’t passive downtime for the brain. It’s an active period of repair, when memories are consolidated, neural connections are strengthened, and metabolic waste is cleared away. With sleep apnea, that recovery process is repeatedly disrupted. The brain spends the night in a low-grade fight-or-flight state. At the same time, repeated breathing interruptions reduce the amount of oxygen reaching the brain. Over months and years, this combination of fragmented sleep and intermittent oxygen deprivation takes a measurable toll on both brain structure and function. In a four-year study, neurobiologists at the University of California, Irvine found that people with OSA exhibited measurable white matter damage alongside declines in attention, visual memory and visual processing.