NCT03410095

The Brain Changes in Sleep Apnea Study

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 80 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Dr. Andrew Lim · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Sleep is critical to human health, but insufficient and disrupted sleep caused by sleep apnea are common and have a major impact on brain health. However, there is still much that is not known about how sleep apnea damages the brain and what can be done to fix this. The Brain Changes in Sleep Apnea Study will look at the brain health of people with severe sleep apnea both before and after 4 months of treatment with a CPAP machine. Pre- and post-CPAP treatment, 80 participants with severe sleep apnea will undergo cognitive testing, blood and urine tests, a pulse wave velocity test, and an MRI. Also pre- and post-CPAP treatment, participants will wear a blood pressure monitor for 24 hours, wear an accelerometer watch for 8 nights to track the duration and quality of their sleep, and wear a device for 1 night of sleep to assess their breathing and blood oxygen levels. It is expected that there will be improvements in participants' brain health after 4 months of CPAP treatment.

Detailed description

Between January 2018 and February 2022, the Brain Changes in Sleep Apnea Study will recruit 80 adults with newly diagnosed severe sleep apnea attending the sleep clinics at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (n=40) or the University of Edinburgh (n=40). Participants will undergo home-based assessment with 3 wearable devices (24 hours of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, 8 nights of actigraphy to assess sleep duration and fragmentation, and 1 night of finger-probe peripheral arterial tonometry and oximetry to assess cardiorespiratory physiology including sleep apnea), completion of a sleep and health questionnaire, 24-hour collection of urine for assessing sympathetic nervous system activity, blood banking for endothelial biomarkers, cognitive evaluation, pulse wave velocity test, and an MRI of the brain, at 2 time points: 1) after initial polysomnographic diagnosis of sleep apnea but before the initiation of CPAP, and 2) after 4 months of CPAP treatment.

Conditions

• Sleep
• Sleep Apnea
• Sleep Apnea Syndromes

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DIAGNOSTIC_TEST	Brain MRI, cognitive testing, bloodwork	Participants will undergo 3-Tesla MRI. Scan time will be about 1 hour and 15 minutes per subject per session at the Sunnybrook site. The protocol is designed to image SVD burden by quantifying PVS and WMH volumes, and image various physiological estimates on the brain. Participants will undergo the following cognitive tests: Behavioural Neurology Assessment-R (BNA-R), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and BrainScreen. Blood samples will be assayed for inflammatory and endothelial function. Classical vascular risk factors will also be assessed. Once data collection is complete, DNA will be extracted from the frozen PBMC fraction and will be genotyped for APOE genotype and a panel of other single nucleotide polymorphisms known to be associated with cognition and cerebrovascular disease.

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-12-12
• Primary completion: 2022-02-15
• Completion: 2022-06-15
• First posted: 2018-01-25
• Last updated: 2021-03-22

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Canada