Can sleep apnea manifest itself mainly via cognitive symptoms and without fatigue ?
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Hi everyone.
Can sleep apnea manifest itself mainly via cognitive symptoms (poorer memory, inability to reason, poor concentration...) and without fatigue ?Below is the complete story in summary and my symptoms.
My father has sleep apnea. I'm a man, I'm fat. I wake up sometimes (once every 3 or 4 months) feeling like I'm choking/drowning, I might have high blood pressure (but it might be a consequence of my diet) since everything began. I did a STOPBANG test found on the net and I got a 5/8 (the method is not rigorous, I know, but since it's only a score, I guess it's not that unreliable).
It all started around October 2020. At the time I had been on 50mg daily of Sertraline (an SSRI) for about ten months to treat OCD. I felt like I had lost 50 IQ points, just like that, for no reason, I felt dumber than a few months before. I told my psychiatrist about it and he said it was probably a side effect of the antidepressant. It was annoying, but I didn't worry about it any more than that until I went completely off the meds in January 2022. These symptoms never went away and seem to indicate sleep apnea, I have an appointment with a doctor before I do a sleep study around the fifteenth of May.
Snoring: I snore loudly according to those around me.
Interrupted breathing in my sleep: According to someone close to me, this has already happened. Also, I sometimes wake up feeling like I'm drowning.
Cognitive Problems: I have always understood everything fairly quickly, in fact I don't remember ever having trouble understanding anything. Now everything takes me forever to figure out when I do, even things I used to know I understood (I can't recognize the pattern of a simple cross product anymore). I used to be able to concentrate well, this is not the case anymore, reading a simple newspaper article can be complicated sometimes. I used to love to read philosophy books, I can't do it anymore (including books I've already read where I got something out of them). I basically feel like I've lost 50 IQ points. I feel dumb.
Memory problems: I have often been suspected of being hypermnesic (no idea if this is the case, knowing this would be useless). I have always had a very good memory, almost a photographic memory at times, this is no longer the case at all.
Dry mouth in the morning: It's sometimes happening, it was quite regular for some weeks/months.
I guess it seems pretty obvious that it's sleep apnea, but here goes... I'm not tired nor sleepy. All this makes me doubt and I don't know where to turn (my appointments with my doctor and then my sleep study will take place in about 10 days). So I wonder if it is possible to have sleep apnea without fatigue hence my question at the beginning of the post.
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