The earliest description of sleep apnea goes back to ancient Greek mythology about Bacchylus. Born in 360 BC, he was the son of Zeus and the god in charge of wine. He was born so fat that when meeting guests he had to place a large box in front of him, covering the rest of his body, showing only his head and face to talk to people, and when eating he could only get his food and drink to his stomach by manual means. In addition to overeating, he was also very sleepy, requiring a person to put a thin and long needle through the fatty layer into the muscle, and only severe pain could wake him up from a sound sleep. He also snored terribly during sleep and suffered frequent respiratory arrests, eventually dying of asphyxiation. In 1877, a physician documented in detail the appearance of Chen-Schi breathing in a patient with cerebral hemorrhage, a specific apnea phenomenon that occurs mostly in patients with cerebrovascular accidents and heart failure. It was described at the time as follows: A senior citizen snores loudly after sleeping in the supine position, marking a marked increase in pharyngeal resistance. Whenever the respiratory movement cannot overcome the resistance of the airway, snoring disappears from time to time for several respiratory cycles, accompanied by ineffective chest respiratory movement, and finally with a loud snore, airflow is restored, followed by compensatory deep breathing, and then breathing gradually stabilizes. The appearance and disappearance of snoring sounds occurred regularly, week after week. The examination also revealed that the loss of airflow did not only originate from the simple obstruction of the airway caused by the back of the tongue, but also from the total loss of respiratory movement. The recovery of respiratory movements did not start with sufficient strength to overcome the resistance in the pharynx, but was gradual and progressive from weak to strong. His vivid and accurate description of apnea (later proved to be mixed apnea) episodes, if one pays attention, one will find that his descriptions are not far from the phenomena we observe in our lives. England’s Dickens was a household name and novelist known for his keen observations. He is considered to be the first person to describe in detail and accurately the characteristics of a person with sleep apnea syndrome. In Pickwick’s Gaiden, published in 1836, he created a literary character named Joe (Joe), a small, fat boy with a purplish, puffy face and an eccentric personality, based on a man he knew. Spending most of the day eating and sleeping, it was usually difficult to wake him up from his morbid sleep, which, together with the loud snoring he often made during sleep, made him a frequent target of ridicule. In addition, Dickens also suggested that drinking alcohol could aggravate the symptoms. 1956, medical doctors named a new disorder based on this image, namely Pickwick’s syndrome, also known as obesity hypoventilation syndrome, whose typical clinical features are: obesity, drowsiness, right heart insufficiency (manifested as edema), and a marked increase in red blood cells (manifested as a reddened face). However, it was not clear how these clinical manifestations were intrinsically linked and why they occurred. It was not until 1965, with the further understanding of the nature of sleep and the development of sensory recording technology, that Kuhl in Germany and Gastaut in France synthesized the sporadic knowledge of respiratory arrest during sleep and gradually unveiled the mystery of this nocturnal killer. Both scholars are renowned neurologists, not respiratory specialists. They found that frequent obstruction of the airway and repeated awakenings during sleep in obese narcoleptic patients resulted in severe hypoxia and sleep disturbances, and officially named it sleep apnea. This is the pathophysiological basis for a series of clinical manifestations such as daytime sleepiness in patients with Pickwick syndrome, i.e., it all stems from the obstruction of the upper airway during sleep. Later studies gradually found that Pickwick’s syndrome only accounts for a small proportion of patients with sleep apnea syndrome, and some non-obese people can also suffer from the syndrome. In the 1970s, researchers at Stanford University opened the first sleep clinic, which focused on episodic sleep disorders and closed a few months later due to lack of funding. Later, they established a method of sleep breathing monitoring with polysomnography to treat patients with sleep breathing disorders, and in 1976 established the name of sleep apnea syndrome and the diagnostic criteria, stipulating that the loss of airflow for a duration of 10 seconds or more is called apnea, and that when this apnea occurs frequently and its frequency exceeds 30 times in a 7-hour sleep, it is diagnosed as sleep apnea syndrome. Later, this artificial definition, which relied solely on polysomnographic findings, was modified several times, adding the concept of hypoventilation and incorporating daytime clinical symptoms. in 1993 Guilleminalt introduced the concept of upper airway resistance syndrome, and sleep apnea gradually became a syndrome with a spectrum of clinical disorders. Tracheotomy has been used to treat critically ill patients since 1969, and in 1981, Professor Sullivan in Australia made a breakthrough in the treatment of this disorder by applying continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) to treat sleep apnea successfully. At that time, Professor Sullivan diagnosed a particularly severe case of sleep apnea, and the only treatment available at that time was tracheotomy, but the patient disagreed and asked what could be done to hold the collapsed airway open. After the article was published in Lancet, a new era of sleep apnea treatment was created. It was not until 1985, when a commercially available nasal mask with better comfort was introduced, that the use of CPAP gradually became popular. 1991 saw the introduction of the Bi-level ventilator (BiPAP), which could switch with the phase of breathing, and was the result of a collaboration between sleep respiratory specialist Professor Sanders and Respironics, Inc. In 1993, the Australian company Resmed introduced the Auto-CPAP, an intelligent CPAP capable of increasing or decreasing pressure in response to changes in upper airway resistance, which improved comfort and reduced the average CPAP pressure for long-term treatment. It is worth noting that, also in 1981, Fujita in the United States applied uvulopalatopharyngoplasty for sleep apnea, which became the most common surgical treatment for this disorder, but its dominance was gradually replaced by noninvasive ventilation in the mid- to late-1980s. After several decades of development, a new and marginal interdisciplinary discipline, sleep medicine, has been formed, and in 2007 the American Board of Medical Examiners officially listed sleep medicine as a separate subject alongside respiratory and cardiovascular specialties in the internal medicine licensing examination. In addition to sleep centers, many major hospitals such as Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School have established independent sleep medicine departments. The American Thoracic Society (ATS) developed an outline of training and skills for respiratory physicians in the specialty of sleep in 2006. Modern sleep medicine in China originated in the 1980s with the recognition of sleep apnea. Professor Huang Xizhen of Peking Union Medical College Hospital established the first sleep respiratory disease center in China. After more than 20 years of development, according to incomplete statistics, more than 600 hospitals have set up sleep centers or sleep laboratories, and in 1994, the China Sleep Research Society, a national-level society under the leadership of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, was established, with more than 1200 members, involving basic research and clinical medicine in various disciplines such as respiratory, ENT, oral, pediatric, neuropsychiatric, geriatric, cardiovascular and Chinese medicine. It has more than 1200 members, covering basic research and clinical medicine of respiratory, ENT, stomatology, pediatrics, neuropsychiatric, geriatric, cardiovascular and Chinese medicine. The Chinese Medical Association’s Respiratory Diseases Branch established the Sleep Study Group in 2000 and formulated the related treatment guidelines in 2004. Many major medical schools have trained graduate students in the field of sleep medicine, and related content has been included in the textbooks for undergraduate medical students. The knowledge and skills of sleep medicine have been included in the training program for specialist physicians developed by the Ministry of Health. Domestic self-developed non-invasive ventilators, including CPAP, BiPAP and Auto-CPAP, have been introduced. In the practice of sleep medicine, sleep respiratory medicine has always been and will always be the most dynamic part of the discipline.