Updated Concepts on Treatment Outcomes for Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea is a highly prevalent and poorly understood condition that not only leads to significant individual patient health damage, but carries a large societal cost secondary to excessive healthcare utilization, motor-vehicle accidents, and work absenteeism. While a significant fund of knowledge about its damaging effects on the cardiovascular system and neural pathways has been gathered over the past few decades, the translation to direct patient care still presents numerous challenges. With the exception of clear issues such as socially unacceptable snoring and breathing irregularities, the exact cause and effect relationship between airway narrowing, hypoxemia, and sleep fragmentation with subjective sleep-related complaints and neurocognitive symptoms is less clear. Besides better-defined clinical diagnostic criteria, the need for clear serum, saliva, or urine biomarkers to assess the physiologic burden of disease remains a work in progress, as are well-defined long-term clinically relevant outcomes of interest. Here, readers will be guided to a critical evaluation on the current main metrics of sleep study, suggested steps on diagnostic and treatment goals, and introduced to the concept of a continuum of disease.