How to Explain the Sleep Apnea/Dentist Connection to Your Patients
While you understand the sleep apnea/dentist connection, your patients will likely wonder why their dentist, not their medical doctor, offers highly effective sleep apnea treatment. Due to the complex nature of this sleep disorder, there’s a lot of information to relay to the patient, and some of it can be quite confusing.
It’s your duty, however, to explain the sleep apnea/dentist connection in terms your patients will understand. Remember that following their sleep apnea diagnosis, they will likely be upset and even fearful about what this means for the rest of their lives. They will also be concerned about the financial ramifications of sleep apnea treatment. Will their insurance cover it? How long will treatment take? Are there financing options available for treatment? These are all valid questions you and your team must answer.
Explain the Dentist’s Role in the Treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnea
You’ll have to explain this to your patients: Dentists are essential in identifying and evaluating patients with sleep apnea. Regular dental exams involve looking at the small upper airway and other anatomical features that increase the risk of OSA.
When sleep apnea dentists suspect their patients have OSA, they suggest a sleep study. Now, with home sleep tests from sleeptest.com, your patients can take a sleep study in the privacy of their own home over the course of just two nights. Those two nights will provide you with all the data you need to formulate an effective treatment plan for your patient.
While dentists can detect risk factors and warning signs of sleep apnea, a home sleep study will be necessary for an official diagnosis. Sleeptest.com ships the home sleep test directly to the patient, and you can track your patient’s results in real-time using some of the most advanced sleep study software in the industry today. Once you have the data, you can determine if CPAP or oral appliance therapy (OAT) is the best treatment route for your patient.
Now is the Time to Get Excited About Sleep Dentistry
Poor sleep is linked to numerous diseases, and it’s widely known that it affects physical and mental health. Poor sleep can:
- Increase inflammation
- Increase blood pressure
- Cause insulin resistance
- Cause weight gain
- Lead to cardiovascular disease
- Cause poor cognition
- Cause memory problems
Sleep disorders lead to an increase in traffic accidents, also. As dentists, you are in the perfect position to screen patients for SDB (sleep-disordered breathing), and sleeptest.com has the technology to send you patients with obstructive sleep apnea. The global prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is estimated at 1 billion people; however, approximately 93% of women’s cases go undiagnosed, and 82% of men’s cases go undiagnosed.
With an easy home sleep test, your patients will get the sleep disorder diagnosis previously missed, and OSA treatment can begin, whether that’s CPAP or oral appliance therapy.
Learn More About Sleeptest.com
Our custom-developed online software, SleepTestCRM, allows clinicians to submit patients quickly. From there, we manage patient benefits, telemedicine, shipping, receiving, and interpretation of the data while keeping you informed with real-time email alerts and a custom portal. To learn more about sleeptest.com, visit our website and sign up online. You can also call us directly at [lct_phone] to ask questions or sign up over the phone.
Many couples joke about their partner’s snoring and often kick the snoring spouse to the couch or guest room, but snoring may indicate a severe medical condition such as Obstructive Sleep Apnea. While snoring may seem like an annoyance that you have to put up with because your marriage vows say you have to take the good and the bad until death do you part, snoring is the sound people make when they struggle to breathe during sleep.
Before diving into what drugs may contribute to sleep apnea, it’s important to clarify that the upcoming list of medications has not been shown to cause Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), the most common of the three types of sleep apnea. However, these medications result in weight gain and some other symptoms tied to sleep apnea.
We encourage you to never stop taking medication until speaking to the prescribing physician. The information contained here is meant to show you that sleep apnea results from several factors—medication is just one of those many factors.
Understanding the symptoms and available tests is crucial if you suspect you have Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) or have been recently diagnosed. The terrible sleep, the waking up feeling tired, the daytime fatigue, the sore throat in the mornings, headaches, and the lack of concentration and memory.
