Sleep-dependent memory consolidation in patients with sleep disorders

Summary: Sleep can improve the off-line memory consolidation of new items of declarative and non-declarative information in healthy subjects, whereas acute sleep loss, as well as sleep restriction and fragmentation, impair consolidation. This suggests that, by modifying the amount and/or architecture of sleep, chronic sleep disorders may also lead to a lower gain in off-line consolidation, which in turn may be responsible for the varying levels of impaired performance at memory tasks usually observed in sleep-disordered patients.The experimental studies conducted to date have shown specific impairments of sleep-dependent consolidation overall for verbal and visual declarative information in patients with primary insomnia, for verbal declarative information in patients with obstructive slee...

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