Innovative pathophysiological phenotyping of obstructive sleep apnea patients for individualized therapy selection.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common disorder associated with considerable health risks including mortality. The recommended treatment option for more severe OSA is continuous positive airway pressure or CPAP. It has been demonstrated that CPAP is able to mitigate the OSA-associated risks but its effectiveness remains rather low as its use is often hampered by poor tolerance. Consequently there is a high need for non-CPAP therapies. The challenge with these therapies is that the outcome in unselected patients is variable. In this project we will focus on an innovative approach that would allow to determine all pathophysiological traits in the individual OSA patient. First we aim at demonstrating that the anatomical traits, site of upper airway obstruction and tendency of the upper airway to collapse during sleep, can be derived from flow signals that are collected during sleep studies anyway. Secondly we will conduct studies to predict the outcome with non-CPAP therapies integrating the noninvasive anatomical assessment with the validated method for phenotyping. Two distinct types of surgery will thus be analyzed. Lastly we will apply the method for determining the traits of patients that undergo a combination treatment. This project aims at identifying predictors of treatment success in the individual patient based on a better understanding of OSA pathophysiology. This individualized therapy selection will likely yield to better health outcomes with non-CPAP therapies.

Keywords:OTORHINOLARYNGOLOGY

Disciplines:Otorhinolaryngology, Speech, language and hearing sciences