"Vita-Salute" San Raffaele University, Faculty of Psychology, Milan, Italy; IRCCS San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Neurology - Sleep Disorders Center, Milan, Italy.
IRCCS San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Neurology - Sleep Disorders Center, Milan, Italy.
Cortex. 2017 Oct;95:136-142. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.08.004. Epub 2017 Aug 9.
Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder characterized by episodes of complete or partial obstruction of respiratory airways during sleep that leads to hypoxaemia and sleep fragmentation. One relevant daytime consequence of OSA is a negative impact on neurocognitive domain, ranging from psychomotor performance to executive function. In spite of a huge amount of evidence regarding cognitive impairment, little is known about perceptual processing in these patients. The aim of this research is to investigate the effects of OSA on visual mechanisms by employing a visual search paradigm. 19 OSA patients and 19 age-matched healthy controls (HC) participated in a case-control study. After a nocturnal cardiorespiratory monitoring, patients performed a visual search task in which they had to detect the presence/absence of a target (letter T) embedded in the 50% of trials into a set of distractors (letters Os, Xs, or Ls). Target's salience and distractors' numerosity were manipulated as independent variables, whereas accuracy and reaction times (RT) were recorded as dependent variables. HC, after the exclusion of any sleep disorder or sleepiness, performed the same experiments. Results generally confirmed the typical effects of visual search. OSA patients reported significantly slower RT in comparison with HC, indicating an overall perceptual deficit consisting in a harder extraction of relevant information from noise. Neither patients' age nor the objective clinical indices were associated with RT. This study indicates the presence of an impairment in OSA patients involving basic mechanisms of visual processing and likely ascribable to the disorder per se.
阻塞性睡眠呼吸暂停（OSA）是一种常见的睡眠障碍，其特征是睡眠期间呼吸道完全或部分阻塞，导致低氧血症和睡眠片段化。OSA 的一个相关日间后果是对神经认知领域产生负面影响，从心理运动表现到执行功能。尽管有大量关于认知障碍的证据，但对于这些患者的感知处理知之甚少。本研究旨在通过视觉搜索范式研究 OSA 对视觉机制的影响。19 名 OSA 患者和 19 名年龄匹配的健康对照者（HC）参加了病例对照研究。在进行了一夜的心肺呼吸监测后，患者进行了一项视觉搜索任务，他们必须在 50%的试验中检测到目标（字母 T）是否存在于一组分心物（字母 Os、Xs 或 Ls）中。目标的显著性和分心物的数量被作为独立变量进行操纵，而准确性和反应时间（RT）作为因变量进行记录。HC 在排除任何睡眠障碍或嗜睡后进行了相同的实验。结果普遍证实了视觉搜索的典型效应。与 HC 相比，OSA 患者的 RT 明显较慢，这表明存在整体感知缺陷，即从噪声中更难提取相关信息。患者的年龄和客观临床指标均与 RT 无关。这项研究表明，OSA 患者存在涉及视觉处理基本机制的损害，可能归因于该疾病本身。
