Sleep Apnea in Parkinson's Disease

Yuping Wang, Tatsuo Nitta, Kenji Nakashima and Kazuro Takahashi

Division of Neurology, Institute of Neurological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Tottori University, Yonago 683, Japan

Fifteen Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and 9 control subjects were studied by polysomnography. Sleep apnea indexes between the 2 groups showed no significant differences in the whole group comparison. However, PD patients with long disease duration had no sleep apnea, while the patients with short disease duration had severe sleep apnea, suggesting a complicated process including many factors, such as unstable condition of the nervous system during the disease progress, different medication at different stages of the disease, etc. There were more male patients with sleep apnea than female among the PD patients in this study. The possible reason for male sex prominence might be due to the endocrine differences in sex caused by PD and its medication.

Key words: disease duration; Parkinson'sdisease; polysomnography; sleep apnea

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