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 upper airway abnormalities are frequent and severe. Invasive methods are used to identify and quantitate the obstruction, to precisely locate its site, etc. as part of pre-treatment or of preoperative evaluations. These methods (lateral skull radiographs, computerized tomography, MRI, fibroscopies, etc) are too expensive and too invasive to be utilized in field surveys. To the classical sleep questionnaires and anthropometric measurements, some simple nose-throat examinations, easily accepted by the volunteers in a population study, could add useful information for the identification of the subjects at risk for sleep-disordered breathing. The present paper is a review of these examinations and of their utility.