Combined Upper-airway and Breathing Control Therapies for Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Overview

The current study combines two treatments for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), oral appliances and supplemental inspired oxygen. The following aims will be tested: Aim 1. To determine whether supplemental inspired oxygen further reduces OSA severity (apnea-hypopnea index) in patients using an oral appliance. Aim 2. To determine whether baseline OSA phenotypes can predict the efficacy of oral appliances versus supplemental oxygen versus both treatments in combination. We will test whether responders to oral appliances have distinct pathophysiological characteristics compared with oxygen responders.

Pre-specified primary analysis for Aim 1 is the change in AHI with combination treatment versus oral appliance alone (%reduction versus placebo; including hypopnea events without desaturation/arousals). Aim 2 seeks to identify subgroups of patients that have the greatest reduction in AHI (responders) with each treatment (post-hoc). We will use baseline physiological measures of the four traits causing OSA (collapsibility, responsiveness, loop gain, arousal threshold) to determine which characteristics predict responses to each intervention (leave-one-out support vector machine modeling). Clinical measures of the same traits will be estimated from the placebo night to confirm that responses can be predicted with clinically-available data. We will also test whether responders to oral appliances have a greater response to oxygen than oral appliance non-responders (and vice-versa), to address whether responders to both treatments are similar or different.

Conditions