Hi my name is Lisa Harrison. I work for Lakefront Family Dentistry, and I’m here today to talk about sleep apnea, or obstructive sleep apnea, commonly referred to as OSA.
So, What is Obstructive Sleep Apnea?
Basically, what it is, it’s the pause while you’re sleeping. It’s a pause in your breathing while you’re sleeping, and some patients actually stop breathing up to 30 times in an hour, which is on the severe side. But if it goes undetected, basically, it can cause lots of other issues in your life. So getting enough sleep is very important.
One of the main questions people have is what causes obstructive sleep apnea, and soft tissue abnormalities in your upper airway–it’s one of the things. Another thing is enlarged tongue, enlarged tonsils, narrow airways. These are some of the causes of obstructive sleep apnea.
What are Some Symptoms a Person May Experience?
- Insomnia
- Morning headaches
- Loud snoring
- Obesity
- Hypertension
These are just some of the symptoms that you may experience if you have sleep apnea. It does go undetected quite often, and here at Lakefront Family Dentistry, we do have the technology to do a 3D scan on you or 2D scan on you using our Orthophos SL 2D/3D scan. Not only does it have the ability to see teeth, bones, jaw–it actually can also scan your airway, and right behind me is an airway scan of a patient, and the red area does indicate narrowness and obstruction in the airway path.
So, How Can Lakefront Family Dentistry Help a Patient Whose Results Show That There is Some Narrowness in Their Airway or Any Airway Obstruction?
The first thing that we do is we want to test to see if you are even positive for, if you test positive for sleep apnea, which is using our one-night sleep study. It’s an in-home sleep study. It’s a unit Dr. Hauser has invested in this technology for us to be able to send home our patients with this ResMed ApneaLink Air Unit. It’s for one night.
Basically, it’s a finger sensor, a nose cannula that measures the oxygen, and basically turn it on, sleep with it for one night, bring it back to us, and then we ship off your results to a physician who does an interp report and lets us know what the results and the diagnosis to see if they actually test positive for sleep apnea.
Based on the physician’s diagnosis, depending on if you are a low, severe, or high score, they would make the recommendations based on your score. So, anybody who’s low or moderate, we can do an OptiSleep oral appliance for you. So, that is made here at the office through digital 3D software. The appliance is nice, thin, comfortable, durable, two-piece appliance that allows you to open and close your mouth naturally, and also allows your lips to close while you sleep so you can breathe through your nose normally and it will stop your snoring.
So, if you are interested in being tested for sleep apnea, please contact Lakefront Family Dentistry. Our phone number is (951) 244-9495.
We do have a button there that’s make an appointment. You just click that button, fill out the make an appointment form, and somebody from our office will contact you and we will schedule a time that is most convenient for you.
Thanks for listening, have a great day, and remember, it’s never good to not breathe while you’re sleeping. Have a great day.
