Dentaltown February 2013 - (Page 54)

sleep dentistry feature by David K. Randall This is the tale of how an Australian man with a vacuum cleaner fixed a mistake in evolution. It begins in the late 1970s. Colin Sullivan is a physician in the Respiratory Unit at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. There, he treats patients who have problems breathing. The most common complaint, by far, is snoring. Sullivan knows better than most doctors in his field that snoring is often a sign of a serious disorder known as sleep apnea. The disorder had been identified only about a decade earlier. Patients with sleep apnea experience a strange nightly sensation that brings the body disturbingly close to death. As if on a seesaw, the lack of air causes the oxygen levels in the blood to plummet and the blood pressure to jump. And for some patients, the heart stops beating for almost ten seconds at a time. Eventually, the brain gets the urgent message that the body is choking. The brain jolts awake, and the body instinctively gasps for air. Yet as soon as the airway is clear, the brain immediately falls back to sleep. That’s when the cycle starts again. It is all so quick that it can happen more than twenty times an hour, all night long, without the sleeper remembering it the next day. Someone lying next to him or her, however, can hear this process at work: when the rhythmic sawing of a 54 FEBRUARY 2013 » dentaltown.com snorer’s breath pauses and then becomes a hard ghhackghhack-ghhack, it’s most likely the body frantically clearing its airway. Patients with mild cases of sleep apnea complain of constant exhaustion, a result of never spending more than a few minutes asleep at a time. Severe cases can be life-threatening. A 1992 report by the National Commission on Sleep Disorders estimated that sleep apnea was the cause of 38,000 fatal heart attacks and strokes in the United States each year. Sleep apnea was discovered when a group of American physicians noticed that some obese patients complained of overwhelming fatigue and would drift asleep unintentionally. With a literary flourish, they named the condition Pickwickian syndrome after a character in Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, who falls asleep standing up. Doctors incorrectly attributed the sleepiness to a combination of excess weight and abnormally high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. It was only later that science understood sleep apnea to be a common breathing disorder caused by the position of the tongue and tissues of the throat. It was then given the name apnea, from the Greek word for breathless. http://www.dentaltown.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown February 2013

Dentaltown.com Highlights
Howard Speaks: The SWOT Analysis
Professional Courtesy: Get Off the Hamster Wheel
Continuing Education Update
Second Opinion: Predicting the Future of Dental Amalgam Use and FDA Regulation
Nuts & Bolts Full Arch Case Dissected… Tips, Tricks & Stuff
Employee Embezzlement, Not Sure Which One
Corporate Profile: GC America
Sleep Dentistry Section
Product Profile: Sleep Optima
Breathe Easy: The Advent of CPAP
ACSDD Consortium
Sleep Apnea
Townie Meeting 2013 Last Call!
Do-it-Yourself Finance, Part III: Debt
The Most Effective Presentation Process Ever
“Patient Friendly Dentistry” to the Rescue
Does Kissing Affect Oral Health?
Can Groundhog Day Make a Difference?
Top 10 Tips to a Successful Practice Start-up
How to Build Up the Perfect Tooth
Why We See Problems with Teeth Whitening: The Science of Whitening Part IV – Whitening Sensitivity Solutions
Continuing Education: Full-Arch Appliance Use for Nighttime Parafunction Management
Ad Index
In This Issue: Implants Are Growing in Popularity
Perio Reports
Continuing Education: A.I.M. for Implant Success
Scaling on Patients with Implants
Dentally Incorrect

Dentaltown February 2013