Such blockages might not improved by creating more space in the back of the mouth. With severe apnea, however, you may also have a buildup of loose, fatty tissue in the throat itself, which can cause blockages further down the airway. The added space can accommodate the loose tissue and tongue while still leaving room for you to inhale and exhale without interruption. Oral appliance therapy can slide your lower jaw forward, creating more space. Gravity pulls this tissue back and creates a crowding at the back of the mouth/top of the throat that blocks the airway and stops you from breathing.
If you have mild to moderate OSA, your airway obstruction may be an upper airway blockage caused by loose tissue at the back of the throat or by the tongue falling backward during sleep. These events are caused by an airway obstruction. If you are found to have OSA, this means you experience breathing events during sleep. Severity Levels of Apnea (Why a Sleep Study Is Necessary to Confirm Apnea) If you were to skip testing and treat severe apnea with a therapy like OAT that’s designed for mild to moderate apnea, the treatment may be unable to keep your airway open, and you would not get the necessary benefits to your health. The key takeaway for people who may have obstructive sleep apnea: using a sleep test to verify both the existence of OSA and its severity is critical to getting effective treatment. In this article, you’ll learn more about the reasons for a sleep study and the types of sleep studies available to you (attended sleep tests in sleep centers or home sleep tests which you self-administer using borrowed equipment). These three factors cannot be verified based on symptoms and screening questionnaires alone sleep physicians need to gather data about your sleep itself in order to confirm apnea, categorize its severity, and rule out the influence of other factors affecting your sleep, such as periodic limb movements or unusual brain activity.
While you may indeed have mild to moderate apnea that can respond well to oral appliance therapy (OAT), in order to design a treatment plan that will actually work for you and alleviate your symptoms, your sleep medicine team needs to verify a few key pieces of information using a sleep study or home sleep test: Compliance tends to be high.Īs exciting as the prospect of using oral appliance therapy is, doctors and sleep medicine dentists don’t make assumptions and prescribe oral appliances based on symptoms, questionnaires, and probabilities alone. Patients tend to respond very well to sleep apnea mouthpieces because they’re fairly comfortable and the lifestyle change is minimal. You could start noticing better sleep after the first night, and the likelihood of needing adjustments to your therapy is minimal. Many patients see this diagnosis as good news: sleep apnea mouthpieces are generally much easier for people to adapt to than a PAP device, because they’re more comfortable and require significantly less upkeep and maintenance. So Why Take an Apnea Test before Pursuing Treatment?īased on your experience of symptoms, you and your doctor may have a working hypothesis that you’re likely to have mild to moderate apnea, the type that would allow you to be treated with an oral appliance ( sleep apnea mouthpiece) as a first-line therapy instead of the more intrusive CPAP. You could be one of those undiagnosed cases. After all, about 22 million Americans are living with this health condition, according to current figures, and an estimated 80% of these cases are thought to be undiagnosed. If you think you have sleep apnea, you may be correct. It’s even possible your doctor or sleep medicine dentist has asked you to pre-screen for apnea using the STOP BANG questionnaire-a diagnostic tool that helps physicians screen patients for the probability of moderate to severe sleep apnea. Maybe your physician has noted your likelihood for apnea based on factors like your BMI, neck circumference, cardiovascular health, or family history. Do you think you have obstructive sleep apnea? Perhaps you’ve taken a sleep apnea quiz online and realize you have several of the symptoms or indicators, like snoring, morning headaches, or excessive daytime sleepiness.
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