Learning more about OSA

In the forums I frequent, newbies sometimes ask:

Can you recommend any basic references or textbooks?

I'd start with two books written by sleep docs for the mass market (or more correctly, the mass market who suffer from OSA).

The first is Sleep Interrupted by Dr. Stephen Park.  This is an intelligently written book that does an excellent job of discussing both what goes wrong in an OSA patient's upper airway and how OSA affects the rest of the body.

The second is Sound Sleep, Sound Mind by Dr. Barry Krakow.   The main purpose of this book is a self-help book for chronic insomnia.  But one of the potential causes of chronic insomonia is untreated OSA, and Krakow devotes a large portion of his book to OSA.  There's a bit of a preaching tone to this book since he's writing to an audience that he largely believes is unwilling to consider OSA as a potential cause for their sleep difficulties.  But along the way there's an awful lot of high quality information about how sleep studies are scored, how OSA affects the EEG of the person, how all those excess arousals (whether from OSA or some other cause) and affect the quality of our sleep.  The whole last part (half?) of the book is a detailed look at OSA and how PAP therapy works to manage OSA and allow us to get a sound night's sleep.   It helps that Krakow is a PAP user himself.

It's worth perusing the AASM's website at http://www.aasmnet.org/.  Much of the site is restricted to Members Only, but there still a wealth of information available to a patient who willing to look for it and who has the background (or interest) in reading technical information.

The list of papers publicly available at the Sleep-Related Breathing Disorders---Standards of Practice Parameters page is particularly useful if one wants to understand what the American Association of Sleep Medicine's accepted standards and recommendations are concerning the diagnosis and treatment of our condition.

Of particular interest to the OSA patient who wants to learn more about what is being done to us in order to treat our condition are the Clinical Guidelines for the Evaluation, Management, and Long-Term Care of Obstructive Sleep Apnea in Adults and the Clinical Guidelines for the Manual Titration of Positive Airway Pressure in Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea.

And it's worth looking at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19238801 and http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=27368 for scholarly discussions of how and when the two different AASM standards for scoring hypopneas affect a patient's diagnosis of OSA as well as the formal definitions of the two standards.

Finally it's worth spending time on the Resmed and Philips Respironics web sites.  The patient-level explanations of how the machines and their features (such as EPR and the Flexes) are not as dumbed down as you might expect.  And, more importantly, if you're patient, you can actually find some quality technical information about how their machines detect events.