Neurostimulation Therapies To Replace CPAP

Charlie has already been on the phone with me this morning. He is talking about it might be easy to do the stimulation but then take a long time to figure out how to do it without causing arousals.

He is wondering about an intermediate quick step. Don't worry about the arousals or even the detection. Develop a device that continuously stimulates the airway muscles to hold the airway open. We turn it on only during our waking hours. Over some months our airway muscles become much stronger and the benefit is carried over when the device is turned off and we go to sleep. We are both desperate.

I am fascinated by the idea. But I think most of the world's funding would go toward curing deafness and blindness and lameness by bionic means before the airway would end up getting figured out well enough for bionics to solve the OSA problem with any elegance.

This might be true. But then again, with the Unites States current emphasis on weight and the fact that the future of medicine will be in curing people of diseases of aging and related to weight, we might get on the agenda sooner. We might just get politically correct one of these days!

Also, curing a nerve that is not there - such as is the case in deafness, blindness, and lameness, takes a further step in technology than simple cuing a nerve to function that is already there in the patients as it is with us.