Snoring & Obstructive Sleep Apnea in Adults & Children

Snoring on its own is common and usually harmless. Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is different — it's a condition where the airway at the back of the throat repeatedly narrows or fully collapses during sleep, cutting off or reducing airflow for brief periods, sometimes dozens or hundreds of times a night. Each episode fragments sleep and can reduce oxygen levels, even though the person often has no memory of it happening.

The reason OSA needs proper diagnosis rather than a home guess is that the severity of someone's snoring doesn't reliably predict the severity of their airway obstruction — a person can snore loudly with mild OSA, or snore relatively quietly with a severe, medically significant form of it. And in children, OSA often looks quite different from the adult picture — more on that below.

It starts with a detailed history and an examination of the airway, and — depending on findings — a sleep study (polysomnography, done overnight, or a simpler home sleep test) to measure how many breathing interruptions occur per hour and how they affect oxygen levels.

In select cases, a procedure called Drug-Induced Sleep Endoscopy (DISE) is used — this involves briefly sedating the patient to a sleep-like state and directly observing, with a small camera, exactly where the airway is collapsing. This matters because treatment (especially surgical treatment) targets the specific level of obstruction, not a generic "throat surgery."

The goal of sleep-apnea treatment is not simply to stop snoring. It is to identify and treat clinically significant airway obstruction and improve the patient's sleep, breathing and overall health.

At Dr Kumaresh ENT Clinic, assessment of sleep-disordered breathing considers the patient's symptoms, sleep-study findings and airway anatomy to determine the most appropriate treatment approach.