The dental alternative to CPAP

Snoring can be described as gasping or snorting at night. These physical responses are actually forms of choking. While you sleep, your throat becomes relaxed and/or the weight of your tongue may block your throat. Your body’s method of self-preservation is to give you a shot of adrenaline to wake you up to stop the choking. Hence, the stop-and-start process of snoring, which may actually be sleep apnea or hypopnea, and can have severe health effects.

Sleep apnea and the sleep disorder hypopnea are closely related. With sleep apnea, your breathing airway closes between 80-100%, resulting in significantly decreased levels of oxygen in the blood. With hypopnea, there is a 50% air blockage and a 3-4% oxygen loss in the blood. With both disorders, you wake feeling exhausted or you simply don’t feel well. Snoring is the recognized calling card of sleep apnea; however, sleep apnea can be noticeable or can be silent. Some sufferers may find that their chief complaint may NOT be snoring. Instead, they cite simply feeling bad, they cannot function, can’t think, or feel like they’ve done an all-nighter. If you’re getting eight hours of sleep, but feel like you’ve only gotten two, you should consider a sleep apnea consultation.

The increased identification, diagnosis and treatment of sleep apnea do not necessarily signal that this is a new problem. It simply reflects the progress made within dentistry and the field of medicine in general. Prior to the 1980’s, the only answer to sleep apnea was a tracheotomy(!). Then, the cumbersome CPAP machine was invented and became the standby for sleep apnea sufferers. Further advances in the 1990’s led to surgery on the soft palate done by ENT doctors. Finally, oral appliances were invented, mimicking the simple concepts used in CPR: open the airways by tilting the head back (tightening the throat muscles) and pulling the jaw forward. From this non-invasive approach, a number of oral devices have been created to move the jaw forward, pulling the tongue forward and tightening the throat muscles at the same time. Sleep apnea dentists now can offer a variety of non-invasive, relatively small oral appliances that eliminate sleep apnea.