Sleep apnea treatment that starts with your airway

What is actually causing your airway to collapse? Because until you answer that question, you're not solving the problem. You're just managing it. Most people who are diagnosed with sleep apnea or breathing problems get handed a CPAP machine and sent home. But nobody asks the most important question. Why is this happening in the first place?

At our practice, before we recommend any treatment, we do three things. First, we review your sleep data. not just your AHI score. Second, we take an airway CBCT, a 3D scan that shows us exactly where your airway is restricted. Third, we do an assessment of your muscles and TMJ. We look at your tongue posture and your breathing habits.

Only after all three of those assessments do we sit down with you and say, here is what is actually going on. For most patients, we find the same underlying problems. The jaw is too narrow, so the tongue falls back. The airway collapses. That's an anatomy problem, and anatomy can be changed.

How many people have got to have a coffee to start out their day or some type of caffeinated beverage. When I was a kid, we had a Coke and a Coke had like 50 milligrams of caffeine. Today, you walk into a gas station to grab a drink. It's like 300 milligrams of caffeine, like six times more.

Why do we need that? It's actually super interesting, right? As we wake up in the morning, if we're not feeling alert, we need that caffeine. And then we consume that caffeine throughout the day. It's creating this negative spiral, right? It's affecting our sleep for the night already in the morning. How that is working is that we actually have something that is called adenosine and it builds up throughout the day.

It prepares us to fall asleep, but the caffeine delays that buildup. It can affect our ability to fall asleep at night and to get good quality sleep. And so if we're not getting good quality sleep, that buildup of adenosine doesn't reset in the night. And so we wake up in the morning feeling tired.

Now we need another coffee. We need a Monster, a Red Bull, to get through the day. If you think about each day, that building on it on each day, you're just going to constantly feel tired and fatigued. If you're feeling fatigued all the time, probably important to get a sleep screening, a sleep test, talk to your doctor, talk to your dentist. It's an important thing.

Most of us have heard the song, it's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring. We grow up thinking that when we become old men, we're going to snore, right? Our grandpa snored, our dads maybe snored. We kind of thought it was endearing and cute, but I'm here to tell you, not endearing or cute.

In fact, it's a sign of underlying health issues. In fact, some of you probably have heard of obstructive sleep apnea. The starting point for obstructive sleep apnea can often be snoring. The other one is upper airway resistance syndrome, but the two are highly related. In fact, when we snore, most of the time it's related to our mouth breathing.

In fact, mouth breathing and snoring is bidirectional. The more we mouth breathe, the more we snore. And the more we snore, the more likely we are to mouth breathe. So an interesting exercise you can do at home is you can keep your lips together, breathe through your nose and try to snore. It's extremely difficult to do.

But then after that, let's have you open your mouth, breathe in and try to snore. And you find that it's very easy to do. So snoring is not something that we want to be doing. In fact, if you or your spouse is snoring, it's time to maybe do a sleep screening and find out what's happening at night and what's happening with your breathing.