Unlike obstructive sleep apnea, in which a person stops breathing when their airway collapses, central sleep apnea is triggered by something going awry in the brain's breathing center.
Our research suggests that the pre-Boetzinger complex contains a fixed number of neurons that we lose as we age.
We wanted to reveal the mechanism behind central sleep apnea, which most commonly affects people after age 65.
We're facing a serious crisis that may end up culling some of the very best people out of the biomedical research enterprise. There will be people who lose all funding or have gaps in funding so they can't maintain the infrastructure they've built.
We speculate that our brains can compensate for up to a 60 percent loss of pre-Boetzinger cells, but the cumulative deficit of these brain cells eventually disrupts our breathing during sleep. There's no biological reason for the body to maintain these cells beyond the average lifespan, and so they do not replenish as we age.
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