Sleep Apnea Surgery

[zeeser]

How common is Sleep Apnea? How successful is it?

[PaulaO2]

Not sure I understand your question. How common is sleep apnea surgery? And how successful is sleep apnea surgery?

Which one? There is no real "sleep apnea surgery" as it depends on the person. I suppose one could consider the "UPPP" as that.

Start at the wiki article which discusses success rates and other stats.

http://www.apneaboard.com/wiki/index.php?title=UPPP

[Beej]

When I have medical questions, I have found several free (may require registration) online medical references to be very helpful.

If you're not a medical jargon person, Web MD works pretty well to explain things in lay people terms.

If you are good with medical jargon, the Medscape site has a good medical reference section where you can look up a lot of different conditions, procedures, and medications. It also aggregates medical news and you can subscribe to specific topic updates if you want to.

The Merck Manual is available online as well, but again, you need to be up on the medical terminology for anatomy and physiology.

Since I'm new, I cannot post links; these should be easily findable with a web search

[BadGoodDeb]

And "surgery" could also cover turbinates reduction, or balloon sinuplasty. Both are (I think) much less invasive than UPPP. So you need to decide what you are asking about!

[KSMatthew]

When I was looking into UPPP years ago, they said "successful" meant your apneas were cut in half. That may or may not leave you still with an OSA diagnosis, depending on how bad you are pre-surgery. Also, the 1-year results showed that half the "successful" patients actually ended up nearly where they started when their symptoms started coming back. I guess if you are really bad off, its worth looking into, but don't expect miracles.

[Kadenz]

I had the UPPP surgery, but learned subsequently that the success rate is only about a third. In other words, in the majority of cases (2 out of 3) it does not work.

In my case, it more or less eliminated by snoring, but most certainly did not solve OSA (in my subsequent overnight test, my AHI was 35 = severe OSA).

The other important thing to bear in mind is that many (it may be most, but I don't know the stats) people who have had the UPPP operation are unable to tolerate a CPAP machine without a humidifier.

I'm now using an CPAP auto-machine (with a humidifier) and that has transformed my life.