Apnea interrupts the sleep of millions of people.
“There are over 100 million adults that are thought to have obstructive sleep apnea,” according to Nathan Jeske, Ph.D, “which is a condition by which individuals have a tough time breathing at night.”
Jeske is professor at UT Health San Antonio’s Center for Pain Therapeutics and Addiction Research. He is also the director of research in the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery in the School of Dentistry.
“What that does is it reduces the amount of oxygen that gets into the body, and that leads to a lot of comorbidities, respiratory, cardiovascular, neurological” Jeske added.
Jeske was curious about reports that sleep apnea patients experience persistent pain much more often than people who sleep normally, so his lab tried to replicate the intermittent low oxygen conditions caused by sleep apnea in mice, and found something interesting.
“The lack of oxygen is leading to an increase in macrophages in the peripheral nervous system that is sensitizing these neurons, through the release of multiple different cytokines, that are leading to a prolonged pain phenotype in the animals.”
So the intermittent lack of oxygen is triggering two warriors of the innate immune system — macrophages and cytokines — and that is making it take longer for the apnea mice to recover from pain, than mice with uninterrupted sleep.
Jeske’s lab also looked at mice who experienced fragmented sleep but not low oxygen. Those mice recovered from pain as quickly as mice with normal sleep patterns.
“So it was due to the lack of oxygen caused by the sleep apnea model,” Jeske said.
This is an exciting beginning for research into potential links between sleep apnea and pain, and the research from Jeske’s lab has been published in the journal Science Signaling. While that work continues, Jeske suggests that people who have or suspect they have obstructive sleep apnea and pain try to stick to the treatment prescribed by their doctor, usually a cpap. It might help.
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio that explores how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
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