Phenotypes of Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Direct Targeted Therapy: A Literature Review

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a heterogenous chronic disorder causing hypoxemia, excessive daytime sleepiness, non-refreshing sleep, nocturia, morning headache, irritability, and memory loss. Cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment, metabolic disorders, and depression are its long-term consequences. The difficulty in treating patients is due to poor compliance, failure to obtain the desired outcome, and complication arising from the multimodality treatment. Direct targeted therapy may overcome these issues. Identification of its phenotypes improves understanding of the disease mechanism, the risk for adverse effects, and predicting response to targeted therapy. Phenotyping of OSA allows treating patients according to their inherent disease and not based on a “one size fits all” method, which may not be applicable for all patients. This approach may improve patients’ compliance with treatment, minimize the associated morbidities, and consequently improve their quality of life.