The current work suggests OSA significantly impacts the pattern of morning performance on a spatial navigation task without influencing evening encoding in cognitively normal older individuals. Although we lack a full mechanistic under-standing of the offline processing of spatial information, hip-pocampal place cells activated during encoding in rodents have been found to be reactivated in a similar temporal sequence during the depolarized up states of SOs during sleep, phe-nomenon thought to at least partially underlie sleep’s role in memory. OSA, with its associated sleep fragmentation and intermittent hypoxia, can short-circuit such replay phenomena,which would be hypothesized to thus negatively impact the subsequent recall of the information encoded before sleep.
