Sleep Apnea Avoidance Pillow Effects on Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome and Snoring

Abstract

A uniquely designed pillow (SONA Pillow) is effective in reducing the number of events in patients with mild to moderate obstructive sleep apnea. Using this pillow also reduces snoring.

Non-CPAP therapies in obstructive sleep apnoea

“…Accordingly, patients with a clear improvement of the AHI with positional therapy tended to be younger, to have a lower AHI and to be less obese [42,52,53]. It is not possible to extract from the data whether AHI, age or obesity is the best predictor of treatment success.…”

“…Different devices such as tennis balls, vests, positional alarms, verbal instruction and pillows are used to avoid the supine position [53][54][55][56][57][58]. There are no data comparing the different devices, with the exception that verbal instructions seem to be less effective than a positional alarm [42,59].…”

Principles of practice parameters for the treatment of sleep disordered breathing in the elderly and frail elderly: the consensus of the International Geriatric Sleep Medicine Task Force

“…One study described one night's use of a specifically designed pillow to avoid the supine position in 22 patients, nine of whom were older than 65 years [102]. This study compared nocturnal respiratory parameters between a baseline night and a night with the supine-avoiding pillow in patients with mild-to-severe OSA.…”

Non-positive airway pressure therapy for obstructive sleep apnea

“…It can occur independently of BMI, age, upper airway anatomy, or lung function [26,27]. However, the patients who respond to positional therapy tend to be younger, have a milder form of OSA with a lower BMI [15,24,25,28,29]. Positional therapy refers to the use of postural changes during sleep to improve OSA.…”

“…However, studies failed to show any superiority from one to another except for positional alarm which appears to be more effective than verbal instructions [15,30]. Positional therapy can result in moderate reductions of AHI [28,29,[31][32][33][34], but is overall inferior to CPAP therapy [35] and its long-term compliance has been poor [33]. In contrast, a recent study [36] showed that newer positional devices could significantly reduce the apnea/hypopnea index (AHI) from a baseline of 26/h to 6/h, with improvement in oxygenation and an objective compliance averaging 73.7%.…”