COMPARISON BETWEEN SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM POSTOPERATIVE EVALUATION OF SLEEP-APNEA AFTER UVULOPALATOPHARYNGOPLASTY

For a long time uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP) has been used to trea t the obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS). The diverse surgical e ffects, the inadequate understanding of operation effect consistency, the possibility of disease progression, and the few reported papers fo r long-term evaluation after UPPP aroused our interest in designing th is study. Fifteen OSAS patients who had undergone UPPP with pre-operat ive, initial post-operative and long-term post-operative polysomnograp hic studies were included in this study. Long-term post-operative poly somnography was undertaken more than five years after surgery. The pol ysomnographic evaluations included respiratory disturbance index (RDI) , duration of saturation SaO(2) < 85 per cent (DOS), and the lowest O- 2 Saturation (LOS). Amongst them, 10 patients with initial post-operat ive RDI reduction > 50 per cent were considered responders. In these r esponders, the long-term follow-up results of all three parameters sho wed improvement compared to the preoperative data. In a comparison bet ween the initial and long-term post-operative sleep study results, LOS and DOS showed no significant difference. However, the long-term post -operative RDI result became significantly worse. More than 80 per cen t of all cases had subjective symptomatic improvement in the long-term post-operative evaluation. The subjective improvement after operation is not adequately correlated to the polysomnographic result. We sugge st that long-term follow-up for patients after UPPP is necessary.