Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat 5, Bologna, Italy.
Sleep Med Rev. 2013 Apr;17(2):91-103. doi: 10.1016/j.smrv.2012.01.004. Epub 2012 Apr 4.
Sleep can improve the off-line memory consolidation of new items of declarative and non-declarative information in healthy subjects, whereas acute sleep loss, as well as sleep restriction and fragmentation, impair consolidation. This suggests that, by modifying the amount and/or architecture of sleep, chronic sleep disorders may also lead to a lower gain in off-line consolidation, which in turn may be responsible for the varying levels of impaired performance at memory tasks usually observed in sleep-disordered patients. The experimental studies conducted to date have shown specific impairments of sleep-dependent consolidation overall for verbal and visual declarative information in patients with primary insomnia, for verbal declarative information in patients with obstructive sleep apnoeas, and for visual procedural skills in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy. These findings corroborate the hypothesis that impaired consolidation is a consequence of the chronically altered organization of sleep. Moreover, they raise several novel questions as to: a) the reversibility of consolidation impairment in the case of effective treatment, b) the possible negative influence of altered prior sleep also on the encoding of new information, and c) the relationships between altered sleep and memory impairment in patients with other (medical, psychiatric or neurological) diseases associated with quantitative and/or qualitative changes of sleep architecture.
睡眠可以改善健康受试者对新的陈述性和非陈述性信息的离线记忆巩固，而急性睡眠剥夺、睡眠限制和碎片化则会损害巩固。这表明，通过改变睡眠的数量和/或结构，慢性睡眠障碍也可能导致离线巩固的增益降低，而这反过来又可能是睡眠障碍患者在记忆任务中表现水平不同的原因。迄今为止进行的实验研究表明，原发性失眠患者的言语和视觉陈述性信息、阻塞性睡眠呼吸暂停患者的言语陈述性信息以及发作性睡病-猝倒患者的视觉程序性技能的睡眠依赖性巩固整体存在特定的损害。这些发现证实了这样一种假设，即巩固受损是睡眠长期改变组织的结果。此外，它们提出了几个新的问题，即：a）有效治疗情况下巩固受损的可逆性，b）先前睡眠改变对新信息编码的可能负面影响，以及 c）其他（医学、精神或神经）疾病患者的睡眠改变与记忆障碍之间的关系，这些疾病与睡眠结构的数量和/或质量变化有关。
