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 »

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 »

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 »

This blog post discusses two articles in the January 2013 issue of the medical journal Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery that report outcomes for sleep apnea surgery involving removing part of the back of the tongue. Two of the major factors that cause obstructive sleep apnea and snoring are head and neck structure (anatomy) and the… Read more »

Sleep Surgery Includes Palate Region and Tongue Region Procedures Sleep surgery is the surgical treatment of snoring and obstructive sleep apnea.  For many years, there was only one procedure (called uvulopalatopharyngoplasty, or UPPP) to treat these problems.  Although UPPP clearly helps many patients, it has some important limitations that I have discussed in a previous… Read more »

I often hear people refer to someone they know—or themselves—as having “the surgery for sleep apnea”, following it up with the assessment about whether “it worked” or not.  Whenever this occurs, I take a deep breath before starting in on the explanation below. My website hopefully makes it clear that there are many procedures available… Read more »