Breathing pauses during sleep: can a non-invasive ENT examination help identify subjects at risk in epidemiological settings?

In patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) anatomic and functional upp er airway abnormalities are frequent and severe. Invasive methods are used to identify and quantitate the obstruction, to precisely locate its site, e tc. as part of pre-treatment or of preoperative evaluations. These methods (lateral skull radiographs, computerized tomography, MRI, fib roscopies, etc) are too expensive and too invasive to be utilized in field surveys. To the classical sleep questionnaires and anthropometric measureme nts, some simple nose-throat examinations, easily accepted by the volunteer s in a population study, could add useful information for the identificatio n of the subjects at risk for sleep-disordered breathing. The present paper is a review of these examinations and of their utility. (C) 2001 Harcourt Publishers Ltd.