Issue link: https://blog.providence.org/i/1526584
8 | Health Matters: Providence Saint John's Health Center A New Treatment to Stop Endless Waking Dr. Omid Mehdizadeh explains how Inspire, a minimally invasive therapy for treating obstructive sleep apnea, works. F or people with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a common condition in which the person's airway fully or partially closes while they 're sleeping, waking up gasping for breath is the least of their problems. Even moderate OSA is implicated in a host of serious health issues, including cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression and diabetes. That's why treating it is so critical, says Omid Mehdizadeh, MD, an otolaryngology and head and neck surgeon at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute at Providence Saint John's Health Center. While the conventional therapy for OSA is continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), which connects patients to a machine that delivers pressurized air via a mask and hose during sleep, many find the system uncomfortable and inconvenient. More recently, a mask-free option became available: Inspire therapy, an app-controlled unit that's implanted in the chest wall and keeps the airway open by stimulating the throat muscles with electrical pulses. Here, Dr. Mehdizadeh talks about the advance that Inspire represents in OSA treatment and what other options there are for OSA. Is anyone with sleep apnea a candidate for Inspire? The Inspire system is mainly for obstructive sleep apnea. There's central apnea and mixed apnea, which have to do with the brain not sending signals to the body to breathe. Inspire is generally not indicated for that. Central and mixed events have to be less than a quarter of total obstructive events for the person to qualify. If I'm newly diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, can I go straight to getting an Inspire unit? No, you have to have tried CPAP and failed it first. CPAP is still considered the gold standard of treatment: It's the lowest- risk treatment for moderate to severe sleep apnea. We determine the severity of your OSA with the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), and that score needs to be less than 100 for Inspire. Patients need to have a body mass index (BMI) of less than 40, although some insurance Dr. Omid Mehdizadeh