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It doesn't seem so tenuous to me.

The entire working mechanism behind snoring is predicated on the airway narrowing enough to vibrate, producing sound.

As you know, obstructive sleep apnea is a condition where the airway narrows so much that it collapses, causing cessation of breathing.




I'm not sure what your objection is. What I find tenuous is the link between snoring/apnea and jaw size, not the link between snoring and apnea.


Assuming the link between snoring/apnea and jaw size -- not the link between snoring and apnea -- is actually what you originally found tenuous, consider that the most effective surgical treatment for OSA: the maxillomandibular advancement (MMA) with 80% to >90% success rate wrt some measure of a "successful" outcome. MMA is a procedure that literally increases the jaw size by moving the jaw forward, which enlarges the airways.

FWIW, I've spent a lot of time researching OSA since I've had severe sleep apnea (AHI ~30 apneas/hour) since childhood. Some startup really needs to figure out a more comfortable way of treating sleep apnea than CPAP or highly invasive (and $100k not-covered-by-insurance) jaw surgery...


I'd never heard of this procedure, just the approach of using a dental appliance to advance the jaw, with poor success rate (something like 20%). The only surgery I've seen widely referenced is turbinate reduction, which supposedly also has a < 50% success rate in treating OSA. I'm surprised I'd never heard of MMA since it apparently does have a very good success rate even without diluting the analysis with practically meaningless effect sizes (mean AHI reduction of 47.8 in a recent meta-analysis [1]).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26606321


Do you have a reference RE poor success rate of mandibular advancement dental appliance? I'm curious because I also had the same poor result when I tried one.




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