Daniel Vena, PhD

Clinical Polysomnographic Methods for Quantifying Collapsibility in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Brigham and Women's Hospital

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Clinical Implications

Obstructive sleep apnea has major health consequences but is challenging to treat. For a range of therapies, efficacy is determined by the severity of underlying pharyngeal collapsibility, yet there is no standardly accepted clinical means to measure it. Here we provide insight into which novel and existing polysomnographic measures of collapsibility are valid, applicable across the population, and predictive of therapeutic outcomes. This research represents an important step toward simplifying advanced metrics that characterize OSA disease mechanisms and bring them closer to clinical decision making for OSA patients.

Research Narrative

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the field of sleep disordered breathing. My major areas of investigation include (1) developing methods to non-invasively phenotype patients based on the structure and severity of pharyngeal collapse using airflow and snoring sounds, and (2) using these phenotypic traits to identify patients that will respond to different site-specific therapies to treat obstructive sleep apnea. This research program addresses a major challenge in the field of sleep apnea research, which is providing patients with alternative treatment options to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP).