Sleep apnea is characterized by a complete cessation of airflow to the lungs for at least a 10 second period, this lack of oxygen could be especially harmful if you are pregnant. This has been revealed by a study that has discovered that pregnant women who have this respiratory problem increase the risk of behaviors related to autism in their babies.
The tests to reach this conclusion, which has been published in the journal PLOS Biology, have been carried out in models of pregnant rats when they were in the middle of pregnancy. This study has been carried out due to the increased incidence of sleep apnea in pregnancy, which according to the study occurs in 15% of uncomplicated pregnancies and in more than 60% of high-risk pregnancies in the third trimester.
Other works had already indicated that the lack of oxygen caused by sleep apnea in pregnant women could interfere with the correct neurological development of fetuses. Now this research has found that the offspring of rats that had been deprived of air for short periods of time, which simulated the effects of sleep apnea, showed behavioral abnormalities soon after birth, such as altered patterns of vocalization of anguish, typical of children with autism.
Maternal hypoxia affects cognitive and social function
Maternal oxygen deprivation also interfered with cognitive and social function in sons, which persisted into adulthood. These effects were reduced working memory and longer-term memory storage, and decreased interest in socially novel situations.
Hypoxia during maternal sleep alters fetal brain development, causing problems in the density and morphology of dendritic spines.
The behavioral changes observed in the offspring were accompanied by significant abnormalities in the density and morphology of dendritic spines, which are neurons that receive and integrate signals from other neurons. In adolescence of pups, the density of male dendritic spines was found to be elevated compared to age-matched control animals.
This, the authors suggest, is due to a lack of spinal reduction, a process that begins in childhood and is essential for normal brain development. However, it is still unclear how maternal oxygen deprivation induced these changes in fetuses that did not experience hypoxia.
Michael Cahill, one of the study’s authors, stated that “based on clinical correlations, it has been theorized that maternal sleep apnea during pregnancy could increase the risk of autism diagnosis in their offspring; however, functional studies are lacking. Here we show that sleep apnea during gestation produces neural and behavioral phenotypes in rodent offspring that closely resemble autism and demonstrate the efficacy of a pharmacological approach in completely reversing the observed behavioral deficits.”
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