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Re: severe obstructive sleep apnea UARS

Posted by Kevin (in Walla Walla) on October 15, 2002 at 15:56:26:

In Reply to: Re: severe obstructive sleep apnea UARS posted by TJ on October 14, 2002 at 15:49:34:

The UPPP surgery alone historically has a success rate of reducing your RDI by 50% in half of the patients. If you have severe apnea with an RDI of 80 and the best you can hope for is a 50/50 chance they can reduce the RDI to 40, I don't know if those odds are worth it. The UPPP in conjunction with the GA and HS, typically called phase I surgery, has odds that are close to this.

The reason why throat surgery has a poor track record, as opposed to an MMA, deals with a branch of physics called Tube Law. If you're old enough to remember hamburger joints serving thick shakes with the paper straws. If you tried to suck through the straw too hard, it collapsed - just like an apnea. If you took your fingers and splinted the straw where it collapsed and sucked again, the straw collapsed at a different point.

My point is that just because you change the area at one point in the throat, don't expect it to work on the whole throat. Most insurance companies will require that you try CPAP before they'll authorize any surgery. In 18 years involved in sleep medicine, I've seen fewer than 10 patients cured by a UPPP. All of those patients had mild apnea to start with, RDI's of 10 to 15. In none of those patients did the results last longer than 4 years.

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