Upper airway resistance syndrome (UARS) is a condition that was first identified and described at Stanford University.
UARS is very similar to obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) because it is a breathing- disorder that occurs while we are sleeping or SRBD.
Just like obstructive sleep apnea, after we fall asleep, the soft tissue of the throat relax so much that the size of the airway is excessively reduced
The diminished airway causes increased effort to simply breathe, which will result in multiple mini awakenings pulling us out of deep sleep referred to as “micro-arousals”
The micro-arousals will awaken us just enough so that the muscle tone of the airway improves because we are almost awake but NOT conscious of how close we are to being fully awake.
Most UARS patients will describe themselves as “light sleepers” with “cold hands and cold feet”.
The consequence of having, potentially hundreds of micro-arousals throughout the night, and there may not even be snoring, is the very poor quality of sleep which can significantly impair how we feel each and every day, and common to virtually ALL UARS patients, they are always tired, morning, afternoon, and night and will often develop a number of conditions referred to as The Functional Somatic Syndromes that you will find listed on the right.
Sadly, many people with UARS will have sleep studies and although the micro-arousals due to an increase in upper airway resistance is very obvious to the person who is evaluating the sleep study, is not enough to meet criteria that define obstructive sleep apnea and the patient will be told that “nothing was found” or “diagnosed”.
The result is that the UARS patient, who could easily be treated for their sleep-related breathing disorder in exactly the same manner as OSA, with a CPAP machine or, in our office, with an Oral Airway Therapy (OAT) appliance, are most often not even offered treatment, leaving the patient to believe that nothing can be done to help them with their sleep/breathing problem and that they will just have to live a lifetime trying to manage their continuous feeling of being tired, anxious, depressed, with headaches and widespread pain or fibromyalgia, to name a few.
On the right is a list of the numerous symptoms often associated with untreated sleep-related breathing problems such...they do not always just have to be managed but if related to UARS, can be significantly diminished or even cured with proper treatment: