About Professor Vik Veer

For decades, Upper Airway Resistance Syndrome (UARS) has been one of sleep medicine's most under-diagnosed conditions. Patients exhausted from a night of effortful breathing through a narrowed airway are routinely told their sleep study is "normal" — because the standard AHI metric only counts full apnoeas and oxygen drops, neither of which UARS produces.

Working with sleep physiologist Michael Storey, Professor Veer has developed a new sleep-study analysis suite designed to identify these patients without the discomfort of oesophageal manometry. The flagship metric — Thoracoabdominal Asynchrony Burden (TAB) — measures how out-of-phase the chest and abdomen become during a night of effortful breathing, broken down by sleep stage and body position. It sits alongside Ventilatory Burden (VB), RERAs, and flow-limitation analysis to give a fuller picture of respiratory effort than standard reports allow.

The service is offered as a re-analysis of existing sleep studies or as part of a new home sleep study through the practice. Read the full UARS & TAB service page →

K-complexes are the brain's natural mechanism for staying asleep through non-threatening background noise. Light sleepers — particularly those whose sleep has stayed fragmented after pregnancy, parenting, or a period of stress — appear to have a weakened K-complex response.

Professor Veer and Michael Storey are developing Nocturnal, a progressive web app that uses a carefully ordered sequence of overnight sound textures to support the K-complex response. The work has involved overnight EEG recordings on the team's own heads, exploring which sound characters produce the strongest measurable response — and which preserve REM sleep rather than blunting it.

Nocturnal is in active development and not yet released. Read the project overview →

Building on a 6,044-patient NHS audit showing that 60.3% of OSA patients no longer met the clinical threshold for sleep apnoea when sleeping on their side, Professor Veer designed two pillows specifically to make sustained side sleeping comfortable and reliable.

The Side Sleep Pro is a two-piece head-and-body system engineered to keep the user in the recovery position throughout the night, with CPAP compatibility built in. The Dual Comfort Pro is a double-sided anti-snoring head pillow with adjustable foam fill, designed as an accessible entry point for snorers and patients with mild positional OSA. Both are sold via iwantgreatsleep.com.

A free patient guide, Your Sleep Position, is available to download as a PDF.

Professor Veer is the Founding Chair of the British Association of Sleep Surgeons (BASS) — the UK's professional society for surgeons working on snoring and obstructive sleep apnoea. BASS exists to develop training, audit and shared standards across the small but growing community of UK sleep surgeons, and to make multidisciplinary surgical pathways available outside a handful of specialist centres.

Alongside this, Professor Veer leads the Advanced Sleep Health Collaborative (ASHC) — the UK's largest multidisciplinary sleep surgery MDT — from the Royal National ENT Hospital, part of University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Read more about the MDT programme →

Professor Veer is one of the most experienced UK surgeons implanting hypoglossal nerve stimulators — small implanted devices that detect the patient's breathing pattern and gently stimulate the hypoglossal nerve to keep the airway open during sleep. He has worked across all three current device platforms — Inspire, Genio, and most recently Restera — and is among the first UK surgeons to implant Restera.

Alongside the clinical work, he contributes to the design and clinical development of next-generation stimulator platforms, with a particular interest in reducing surgical complexity and improving access. Read more about Inspire & Genio → · Read about Restera →

Published in Sleep and Breathing in 2020, Professor Veer's PTLTbE classification is a new system for reporting drug-induced sleep endoscopy findings. It separates tonsillar obstruction from true lateral pharyngeal wall collapse — a distinction the older VOTE classification glossed over — and has been shown to improve interobserver reliability when interpreted by trainees.

PTLTbE is now used as the default reporting system in Professor Veer's NHS and private practice and is being adopted internationally by other sleep surgery centres. Read the full guide to PTLTbE →

Alongside the clinical work, Professor Veer has built a small library of free, browser-based sound tools intended as educational resources for patients and their families:

• Focus Noise — a customisable brown / pink / white / rain noise generator for concentration, masking tinnitus, or supporting sleep onset.
• Womb Soundscape — a synthesised in-utero acoustic environment with maternal lub-dub heartbeat, breathing swell, foetal heartbeat overlay and movement & fluid sounds, designed to settle unsettled newborns.
• Tinnitus Sound Generator — an interactive tool for characterising the frequency and texture of your tinnitus to share with your audiologist.

All audio is generated in the user's browser. Nothing is streamed, recorded, or sent anywhere. These tools are educational and self-help in nature — not medical devices and not treatments.

Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) consistently ranks among the top universities in India and is globally recognised for innovative research and quality education. Professor Veer's appointment reflects his contribution to ENT and sleep surgery internationally.

Over the coming years he plans to visit India regularly to teach advanced surgical techniques for sleep disorders and to support the establishment of hypoglossal nerve stimulation programmes in Indian centres — with the goal of making these cutting-edge treatments more accessible to patients in South Asia.

Professor Veer runs one of the most-watched ENT and sleep-medicine channels on YouTube, with more than 200,000 subscribers and over 30 million total video views. The channel has been recognised by both YouTube and Doctify with national awards for medical education.

The aim is to make specialist ENT and sleep-surgery knowledge directly available to patients in plain language — not as a replacement for clinical assessment, but to help people understand what is happening to them and what their realistic options are. Browse the curated video library →

Vik Veer is a dedicated reviewer for several esteemed medical journals, contributing to the advancement of medical research and knowledge.

• Sleep medicine in otolaryngology units: an international survey.
  Cammaroto G, Bianchi G, Zhang H, Veer V et al. Sleep Breath. 2021 Dec;25(4):2141–2152.
• Patient-reported outcome measure for obstructive sleep apnea: Symptoms, Tiredness, Alertness, Mood and Psychosocial questionnaire: Preliminary results.
  Mehta N, Mandavia R, Patel A, Zhang H, Liu ZW, Kotecha B, Veer V. J Sleep Res. 2020 Apr;29(2):e12960.
• Introducing a new classification for drug-induced sleep endoscopy (DISE): the PTLTbE system.
  Veer V, Zhang H, Mandavia R, Mehta N. Sleep Breath. 2020 Dec;24(4):1685–1693.
• Guidelines on the surgical management of sleep disorders: a systematic review.
  Mandavia R, Mehta N, Veer V. Laryngoscope. 2020 Apr;130(4):1070–1084.
• The use of drug-induced sleep endoscopy in England and Belgium.
  Veer V, Zhang H, Beyers J, Vanderveken O, Kotecha B. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2018 May;275(5):1335–1342.
• Measurement properties of patient-reported outcome measures in adults with OSA: a systematic literature review.
  Abma IL, Van der Wees PJ, Veer V, Westert G, Rovers M. Sleep Med Rev. 2016 Aug;28:18–31.
• Total otolaryngology – head and neck surgery: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2015 June;129(6):620.
• Clinical otology: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2015 Feb;129(2):202.
• The quality of snoring treatment information on the internet.
  Veer V, Alder G, Ullal U. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2014 Dec;271(12):3319–23.
• Bullet points in ENT: postgraduate and exit exam preparation: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2014 Dec;128(12):1126–1127.
• Long-term safety and efficacy of radiofrequency ablation in the treatment of sleep disordered breathing: a meta-analysis.
  Veer V, Yang WY, Green R, Kotecha B. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2014 Nov;271(11):2863–70.
• The role of elastography in evaluating thyroid nodules: a literature review and meta-analysis.
  Veer V, Puttagunta S. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2014 Jul.
• A telephone audit to measure the true incidence of secondary haemorrhage post-tonsillectomy.
  Veer V, Holmes L. Surgical Medicine Open Access Journal. Volume 2 Issue 1, September 2018.
• Pre-operative considerations in aesthetic facial surgery.
  Veer V, Jackson L, Kara N, Hawthorne M. J Laryngol Otol. 2014 Jan;128(1):22–8.
• Practical otology, neurotology and skull base surgery: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2013 Dec;127(12):1244–1245.
• Interview with Professor Anders Tjellstrom.
  Veer V. ENT News Nov 2013: Vol 22(5).
• Fourth International Symposium on Bone Conduction Hearing: conference report.
  Veer V. ENT News Sept 2013: Vol 22(4).
• Otolaryngology prep and practice: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2013 May;127(5):534.
• Endoscopic sinus surgery: anatomy, three dimensional reconstruction, and surgical technique: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2013 April;127(4):440.
• On call from home — reaching too far?
  Veer V, Kara N, Hawthorne M. Ann R Coll Surg Engl. 2013 Mar;95(3):1–3.
• Tonsillectomy: an exceptional treatment?
  Kara N, Lawley A, Veer V, Carey S. Ann R Coll Surg Engl. 2013 Mar;95(3):1–5.
• Current diagnosis and treatment: otolaryngology head and neck: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2013 May;126(9):974.
• Surgical anatomy of the head and neck: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2012 Oct;126(10):1081.
• Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease: a case report and literature review.
  Veer V, Lim A, Issing W. Case Rep Otolaryngol. 2012;2012:497604.
• The use of FDG PET/CT imaging in carcinoma of the head and neck.
  Moor J, Veer V. The Otorhinolaryngologist. 2011 Vol 4(1).
• Anxiety and depression in head and neck out-patients.
  Veer V, Kia S, Papesch M. J Laryngol Otol. 2010 Jul;124(7):774–7.
• Lateral photography of the nasal tip: what is acceptable and can it be improved?
  Ahluwalia S, Veer V, Kenyon GS. Plast Reconstr Surg. 2010 Nov;126(5):250e–252e.
• Neurological disorders of the larynx: book review.
  Veer V. J Laryngol Otol. 2010 Feb;124(2):234.
• Study leave funding for ENT trainees — a national survey of postgraduate centres.
  Moorthy R, Veer V, Abbas L. The Otorhinolaryngologist 2007; 1(2):91–96.
• Study leave funding: a national survey of postgraduate centres.
  Moorthy R, Veer V, Abbas L. Ann R Coll Surg Engl. 2007;89:164–166.
• Catheter-associated urinary tract infections: prevalence of uropathogens and pattern of antimicrobial resistance in a UK hospital.
  Wazait HD, Patel HR, Veer V, et al. BJU Int. 2003 Jun;91(9):806–9.
• Chronic pain as the main presenting symptom of depression following hysterectomy in old age.
  Singh S, Trivedi AN, Veer V. Aust N Z J Obstet Gynaecol. 1999 Feb;39(1):127–30.