OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of nasal surgery alone on quality of life (QOL) in patients with obstructive sleep apnea and nasal obstruction using generic and disease-specific QOL questionnaires. DESIGN Prospective, longitudinal cohort study. PATIENTS Fifty-one consecutive patients with obstructive sleep apnea (50 men and 1 woman; mean age, 39 years; mean [SD] apnea-hypopnea index, 37.4 ...

The sleep apnoea syndromes are a common cause of excessive daytime sleepiness and may lead to pulmonary hypertension, systemic hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, mental dysfunction, heart failure and sudden death. The otolaryngologist is increasingly involved in the multidisciplinary approach to assessment and treatment of the obstructive and mixed forms of sleep apnoea; it is important for the...

The snore is a breathing sound that originates during sleep, either nocturnal or diurnal. Many procedures have been used for its analysis, from simple interrogation, going through acoustic methods that have been developed thanks to the advance of biomedical techniques in recent years. So far a procedure homologated by different laboratories for its study doesn’t exist. The present editorial des...

To investigate the effectiveness of palatal surgery for nonapnoeic snoring, 35 patients were block randomised to undergo one of two different palatoplasty procedures. Patients were admitted pre-operatively for audio recording of snoring sound and video recording of sleeping position, and between 1.0 and 4.1 months (mean 2.5) and between 5.9 and 17.5 months (mean 9.7) post-operatively. Sound fil...

Snoring is caused by the narrowing of the upper airway and it is excited by different locations within the upper airways. This irregularity could lead to the presence of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome (OSAS). Diagnosis of OSAS could therefore be made by snoring sound analysis. This paper proposes the novel method to automatically classify snoring sounds by their excitation locations for ComPa...