As you can probably tell, I truly enjoy sharing ideas with colleagues and patients about some of the challenges we face in treating snoring and obstructive sleep apnea.  One topic that provokes particularly intense discussion is the role of the epiglottis in sleep apnea.  My colleague, Dr. Andrew Goldberg, came up with the title for… Read more »

Disclosure: I have served on the Medical Advisory Board and as a consultant for Apnex Medical, a medical device company that developed the Hypoglossal Nerve Stimulation System to treat obstructive sleep apnea.  At no point did I own any portion of the company, although they did pay for my time devoted to company work, initially… Read more »

Sleep apnea research, including studies of sleep surgery, is moving forward around the world.  On May 4-5, I will be the keynote speaker for the 94th Taiwan Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery Congress in Tainan, Taiwan.  I look forward to continued discussions with colleagues there about many topics, including the current knowledge of any racial and… Read more »

There are many things that we do not understand about obstructive sleep apnea.  This is particularly true for women and men at least 60 years of age, where approximately 20-40% are in the moderate to severe sleep apnea range.  Although sleep apnea is very common among older adults (note: age is just a number, but… Read more »

This month’s issue of the medical journal Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery included an article written by Emmanuel Jauregui, one of our medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, that reported a case I treated with an unusual complication of hyoid suspension (sometimes called hyoid myotomy and suspension). Hyoid suspension is a procedure that… Read more »

Friday, March 15 is World Sleep Day.  According to the World Association of Sleep Medicine, “this annual event is a celebration of sleep and a call to action on important issues related to sleep.”  They have developed a set of Golden Sleep Principles for infants, and they are also raising awareness about all sleep disturbances,… Read more »

Today’s lectures focused on patient evaluation and treatment with surgery and oral appliances. Dr. Peter Cistulli from the University of Sydney discussed findings from the MASPAP randomized trial conducted in Australia that has recently been accepted for publication in a medical journal.  This study compared mandibular advancement splints (also known as oral appliances) against continuous… Read more »

Today’s lectures encompassed a wide range of new developments in sleep disorders as well as non-surgical treatment of obstructive sleep apnea.  Dr. Allan Pack discussed important papers published over the past year, including a number of studies published from a Spanish collaboration of sleep medicine centers showing that untreated severe obstructive sleep apnea was associated… Read more »

The 19th annual Advances in Diagnosis and Treatment of Sleep Apnea and Snoring course is being held in Orlando, Florida from February 15-17.  Although I am one of the Co-Directors, full credit for its excellent combination of medical and surgical topics goes to the two other co-directors who started the course before I joined them… Read more »

This blog post discusses an article in the February 2013 issue of the medical journal Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery. Patients with obstructive sleep apnea are often treated solely based on a result from their sleep study: the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), the number of episodes of blockage of breathing per hour of sleep.  The AHI is… Read more »