Future-Focused Dental Sleep Medicine

Episode #306 with Dr. Steve Carstensen

Airway has a butterfly effect. If you don't breathe well, you don't sleep well. And we all know what poor sleep can do to physical and mental health! So, to stress the importance of treating obstructive sleep apnea early, Kirk Behrendt brings in Dr. Steve Carstensen to talk about the potential orthodontic and health disasters when left untreated. Help people breathe better, not just every night, but over their entire lives! To learn how to make the biggest difference in children, listen to Episode 306 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Dentists can make a difference in people’s health and lives from infancy to old age.

Airway is managed differently for adults and children.

We need to ask if children are sleeping well. There is an inadequate diagnosis for children.

If a child isn’t sleeping well, it is likely because they aren’t breathing well.

The new screener tool from the ADA will help identify more at-risk children.

For adults, other countries are ahead in airway management; the U.S. is tied to CPAP.

Only 18% of people who are supposed to be using their CPAP use it.

About 32% of people don't bother with a diagnosis because they don't want to use a CPAP.  

Quotes:

“My whole life is to make sure that people breathe better every night — and actually, over their whole lives. So, it’s kind of a 4D thing. It’s three dimensions of airway that we all learn about in anatomy class in dental school, plus the fourth dimension of how it affects their lives from their infancy all the way to their old age. And dentists have an amazing and really rewarding way to make a difference in all that.” (06:23—06:51)

“If the American Dental Association is going to roll out a screener, instead of just making up five questions and thinking, ‘Okay, these must be important because we think they are,’ we’re actually going to have scientists, researchers, and there's a periodontist with a PhD in medical science informatics who is going to help us, and we’re going to make this an unkillable tool for anybody to use. So, the ADA will now have the world’s best tool for identifying children at risk for breathing problems. That's a powerful thing because it takes that out of the hands of, ‘Well, I think they breathe okay,’ into something that's really important.” (12:49—13:31)

“There're 163,000 practicing dentists. There're only a few thousand practicing physicians, and out of those few thousand practicing sleep physicians, there're only a few hundred, maybe not even 200, that are practicing pediatric sleep medicine, because the biggest difference is we manage airway completely differently for adults and kids.” (14:17—14:41)

“Sleep physicians don't really have a ton of tools to work with little kids. Plus, the problems are different. So, our screener tool is going to be aimed at identifying those problems, what's going south about these kids’ health and behavior and issues every day, every night, that we can intervene as dentists. Because actually, we’re the ones who are going to be in charge of fixing the problems that we are identifying.” (14:43—15:08)

“If we can identify a four-year-old whose maxilla isn't growing correctly because they don't swallow right because they don't breathe right, then know that by the time they're 12, they're going to be an orthodontic mess. What if we can fix it when they're five? We can make them breathe better and have a better bite.” (15:37—15:53)

“If we’re thinking about adults, then other countries are ahead of us [in airway management], because we in the United States are tied down to CPAP. If you go to get a diagnosis, then you're going to get a CPAP from most sleep physicians. And the sleep physicians are kind of just zeroed in on that.”...