Top Neurologists for Sleep Apnea in Texas

Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center / Houston Methodist Willowbrook | Houston, TX | Sleep neurology, upper airway resistance syndrome

Jerald Simmons is the founding director of The Sleep Education Consortium and practices sleep neurology across Baylor St. Luke's and Houston Methodist hospitals. His clinic evaluates adults and children with obstructive sleep apnea, insomnia, restless legs, and the harder-to-pin-down patterns where someone feels exhausted all day but a standard sleep study looks close to normal.

Dr. Simmons contributed to the foundational 1992 SLEEP paper describing how obstructive sleep apnea and upper airway resistance syndrome produce the same daytime sleepiness even when the standard apnea-hypopnea count does not cross the diagnostic threshold ¹. His early-1990s work with the Stanford sleep group also looked at excessive daytime sleepiness in women with abnormal respiratory efforts during sleep ³ and at upper airway resistance as a factor in infants at risk for sudden infant death syndrome ⁴. He also co-authored SLEEP reports on how untreated sleep-disordered breathing intersects with cardiac failure and arrhythmias ²⁵. For patients whose sleep study was read as "mild" or "normal" but who still feel wrecked every morning, that body of work is directly relevant.

Sleep Medicine / Stanford University School of Medicine affiliation | Frisco, TX | Sleep medicine, psychiatric overlap

Vikas Jain is a sleep medicine physician in Frisco with an academic appointment in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences through Stanford. His clinic handles obstructive sleep apnea, insomnia, and the common overlap between sleep disorders and mood or anxiety conditions.

For sleep apnea patients, that dual footing is useful in practice. Untreated apnea frequently masquerades as depression or attention problems, and standard insomnia treatment can fail for years when an underlying apnea is missed. A sleep physician trained at the intersection of neurology, behavioral sleep medicine, and psychiatry is well positioned to untangle those patterns rather than treat each complaint separately.

Baylor University Medical Center / Methodist Dallas Medical Center | Dallas, TX | Sleep neurology, clinical documentation

Waleed El-Feky is a Dallas-based neurologist who practices across Baylor University Medical Center and Methodist Dallas. His published work leans toward the clinical-reference side of sleep medicine and neurology more broadly.

Dr. El-Feky was first author on a 2007 clinician's guide to sleep disorders in Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings ⁷ and on the 2017 CONTINUUM chapter on sleep medicine coding and coverage — a practical reference that specifies which diagnostic codes and which sleep procedures the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and third-party payers consider appropriate for each clinical scenario ⁸. He has also published case reports on neurological conditions that get mistaken for something else, including a migraine follow-up that turned out to be a pituitary macroadenoma ¹⁰ and a cervical radiculopathy presentation that was actually metastatic cancer ⁹. In a sleep apnea workup, that habit of ruling out the rare-but-important diagnosis matters. He also contributed to a landmark 2005 New England Journal of Medicine report on rabies virus transmission through organ transplantation ⁶.

Baylor University Medical Center affiliation | San Antonio, TX | Sleep-disordered breathing, general neurology

Eleni Vaou practices neurology in San Antonio with training ties to Baylor University Medical Center. Her clinical work includes evaluating adults with suspected sleep-disordered breathing, central apnea, and the neurologic symptoms — morning headaches, cognitive fog, daytime sleepiness, and stroke risk — that often bring a patient to a neurologist before a sleep lab.

For patients whose sleep symptoms come packaged with other neurological complaints, a neurologist who regularly orders and interprets polysomnography is often a faster path to the right diagnosis than bouncing between a primary care office, a sleep clinic, and an ENT.

Houston Methodist Clear Lake Hospital / Citizens Medical Center | Bellaire, TX | General neurology, movement disorders with sleep overlap

Toby Yaltho practices general neurology in the Houston area, with hospital affiliations at Houston Methodist Clear Lake and Citizens Medical Center. His published research sits in movement disorders — a field with heavy overlap with sleep medicine, because REM sleep behavior disorder and sleep-disordered breathing frequently accompany Parkinson's disease and related conditions.

Dr. Yaltho co-authored a 2008 systematic review in Movement Disorders on neuroprotection trials in Parkinson's disease, examining 15 completed studies across 4,000 participants and 13 different drugs to clarify what the evidence does and does not say about slowing disease progression ¹¹. For patients whose sleep apnea shows up alongside tremor, stiffness, or vivid dream-enactment at night, a neurologist who knows both worlds can build a coherent plan instead of handing each symptom to a different specialist.

Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital / HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood | Sugar Land, TX | Sleep neurology, narcolepsy and daytime sleepiness

Gerard Meskill practices sleep neurology in Sugar Land, with hospital affiliations at Houston Methodist Willowbrook and HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood. His clinical and research focus is the full spectrum of excessive daytime sleepiness — obstructive sleep apnea, narcolepsy with and without cataplexy, and the subtler flow-limitation patterns that get missed on a conventional apnea-hypopnea scoring.

Dr. Meskill was first author on a 2021 CNS Drugs analysis of pooled randomized placebo-controlled trials showing that pitolisant (Wakix) reduced both excessive daytime sleepiness and cataplexy in adults with narcolepsy ¹³, and on a companion review in Expert Opinion on Orphan Drugs on how pitolisant fits into cataplexy treatment ¹⁴. He also led a 2020 SLEEP analysis on blood pressure and heart rate when solriamfetol (Sunosi) is added to existing stimulant therapy — a practical safety question patients and clinicians face every day ¹⁵ — and a 2024 SLEEP study on whether quantitative EEG can predict narcolepsy diagnosis when a multiple sleep latency test is impractical ¹⁶. Earlier in his training he contributed to a 2015 Sleep Science paper arguing that flow limitation is an under-recognized form of mild sleep-disordered breathing that can be treated with CPAP to improve symptoms ¹². If your daytime sleepiness is severe, treatment-resistant, or does not fit a clean apnea picture, that research record is directly relevant.