Could Sleep Apnea Be Affecting Your Overall Health?
Sleep is important for overall health. It is our body’s way to make sure that we’re resting. It’s your body’s way to kind of reset from the day and patients who are not sleeping are not as healthy and so it’s exciting in our practice is that we can help patients get a better night’s sleep by making them an oral device to help treat their obstructive sleep apnea.
Obstructive sleep apnea is when the airway closes in a patient at night and it’s kind of ranked from mild, moderate to severe and it depends on how many times per hour that airway is closing at night and what’s exciting in our office is that we can help patients prevent that airway closure and thus keep them sleeping throughout the night. So one of the problems with obstructive sleep apnea is you know if you’re a mild case anywhere between 5 to 15 times per hour per night that airway is closing and when that airway closes down your body automatically reacts to try to open that airway up so it often wakes you up or at least to kind of put your body into a fight or fight response because you’re literally fighting to breathe and so what we can do is we can create an oral device that’s going to pull that lower jaw forward what that’s going to do it’s going to pull that tongue forward and it’s going to keep that airway open so instead of having everything fall back into that airway and close off at 5 to 15 times an hour we’re keeping everything forward and we’re keeping you breathing that means that you can sleep through the night it also usually means that you’re not snoring and so one of the best parts of my job is when patients say that they now can sleep in the same room as their spouse you know they’re no longer bothering them with that snoring noise so they feel better because they’re finally sleeping so they don’t have morning fatigue they don’t have afternoon fatigue they often you know report morning headaches if they have sleep apnea and those can be gone your blood pressure can improve because a lot of times with obstructive sleep apnea you’ll have high blood pressure because your body can just never fully reset and so the goal with an oral device is that we’re fixing that obstructive sleep apnea in order to make everything better so ideally we just want that overall health to be better and patients to be feeling good.