Sleep Apnea
What Is Sleep Apnea?
Sleep apnea is a common sleep disorder where a patient has repeated breathing interruptions during sleep which in turn cause the choking sound as the body struggles to take in air. These interruptions occur when the upper airway and airflow are blocked during sleep. Patients can experience these interruptions many times each night and can be caused by structural abnormalities or brain malfunctions. Whenever breathing stops, your body’s oxygen intake is affected, and this can have serious consequences. Sleep apnea affects millions of Americans, but few do anything about it.

What Are The Symptoms Of Sleep Apnea?
Patients that are suffering from sleep apnea can feel sleepy during the day and often lose focus. These symptoms can cause driving and work-related accidents. In addition, patients with sleep apnea can display one or more of the following symptoms:
- Loud snoring
- Abrupt awakenings from sleep
- Awakening with shortness of breath
- Epidodes of breathing cessations witnessed by another person
- Waking up with a headache in the morning
- Waking up with a dry mouth or a sore throat
- Difficulty staying asleep
- Attention problems
- Irritability
Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Obstructive sleep apnea is the most common form of sleep apnea. OSA occurs when the muscles in the back of your throat relax. These muscles support all of the surrounding tissues such as the tonsils and the side walls of the throat. When the muscles relax, the airway narrows or closes. Your brain senses this inability to breathe and briefly wakes you from sleep to reopen the airway. These lapses in sleep can be so brief you don’t even remember them. These actions can involve a snorting, choking, or gasping sound and can repeat the pattern up to 30 times per hour all night.

Snoring
Sleep Apnea and snoring usually go hand and hand with each other and is one of the many symptoms of it. Snoring is when a sound is created from vibrations of the soft palate that happen when you breathe, partially obstructing sleep. Usually a harmless condition, it can indicate rising health concerns. If the snoring becomes loud and Habitual, it can disrupt sleep, especially if you have a partner sleeping with you. Snoring is most common in men and older people, usually from being overweight.
Snoring Treatment In Webster, TX
If snoring is a persistent problem you would like to get rid of, there are several treatment options, Ranging from surgical intervention to home remedies. Snoring mostly can be treated by changing your lifestyle with some medications you can acquire from your pharmacist that can be an efficient combo to treat it. Some of these methods include:
- Losing weight
- Sleeping on your side or stomach
- Nasal strips and dilators
- Medications to help with decongestant
- Quit smoking
In some cases, you may need nasal sprays or additional methods of treatment. If these problems persist and you are also experiencing severe sleep apnea, corrective surgery is most likely the next step.
How Clear Lake Dental Care & Implant Center Treats Sleep Apnea
At Clear Lake Dental Care, our treatments for sleep apnea start with lifestyle changes such as losing weight, limiting alcohol consumption, or quitting smoking. Next, we progress to oral appliance therapy, SomnoDent. Patients that are experiencing severe cases may require surgery as they are in danger of developing serious medical conditions such as high blood pressure and heart problems.
Oral appliance therapy uses what is akin to a sports mouthguard or an orthodontic retainer. Worn only during sleep, the oral appliance supports the jaw in a forward position to help maintain an open upper airway. In contrast to the mask and tubes necessary with CPAP and other breathing devices, oral appliance therapy may be easier for patients to tolerate which is why we utilize it in our office.
SomnoDent is our oral appliance of choice at Clear Lake Dental Care. This appliance should be worn while sleeping to move the jaw forward to a comfortable position. This allows the jaw and tissues to relax, giving you a good night’s sleep. The SomnoDent is made from impressions of your teeth so they are custom-fit to you. With this sleep appliance, you are still able to open your jaw fully, drink, and even speak clearly.
Yes. SomnoDent has a variety of different appliances, and its use is not limited to the amount of remaining dentition. For denture wearers, we use the SomnoDent Edentulous splint. It is made of Acrylic or B Flex material, and it covers the full maxillary palate and is retained in place by a posterior palatal seal.
Denture wearers will fall into one of three categories:
- Completely edentulous — The SomnoDent appliance used here will require functional impressions from a dental lab. The SOMGauge from SomnoMed it then used to determine the proper protrusive bite record. This ensures the final oral SomnoDent appliance will fit snuggly even without teeth. If this method is unsuccessful, it may be necessary to create a silicone duplicate of the patient’s dentures to base the sleep appliance upon. This would then mimic the fit of the patient’s dentures.
- Edentulous lower arch — Patients missing all of their lower teeth can still have a SomnoMed appliance. Generally, the Herbst model is used, creating the fit with the SOMGauge.
- Edentulous upper arch — The process for fitting patients missing all of their upper teeth is similar to that for fully edentulous patients. But a SomnoDent Flex or Fusion mandibular advancement device is recommended for these patients.
The socket left in the gums after the tooth was removed goes through three stages as it heals. First, the area becomes inflamed. The gum becomes inflamed, a blood clot forms inside the socket and granulation tissue forms over the wound. New tissue usually replaces the clot within a week after the extraction. Following this process is the proliferative phase when the wound begins to close. The final stage is the maturation phase, where cells in the site form new connective tissue, called collagen, to fully heal the area.
In central sleep apnea, your brain doesn’t send the proper signals to the muscles that control your breathing. Consequently, you make no effort to breathe for a short period of time. You then awaken with shortness of breath or have difficulty even falling asleep.
Upper airway resistance syndrome can be confused with obstructive sleep apnea, but it is different. Upper airway resistance syndrome (UARS) is listed on the spectrum of sleep-disordered breathing between simple snoring on one end and obstructive sleep apnea on the other. UARS involves upper airway turbulence that occurs as a result of decreasing airway diameter.
The biggest difference between UARS and OSA is that the pauses and decreases in breathing that occur with OSA are absent or very infrequent with UARS patients. Also, OSA is common with obese patients, but UARS occurs with patients who are usually average weight.
UARS starts as simple snoring, but it will eventually progress to obstructive sleep apnea if left untreated.

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