Get Better Sleep with NightLase and ApneaLase

Hi, I'm Dr. Charles Moak with Allure Medical and I want to talk to you about the apnea lays and nightlaise procedure. These are laser procedures that treat not only snoring but can reverse apnea. The first step is to see whether or not you have apnea. Apnea is where you stop breathing for a period of time, usually 10 seconds or more, and the oxygen count goes down a little bit. This is quite common. About 80% of people that have sleep apnea, especially never even diagnosed. And the health implications are enormous. We know that about 33% of women over 30 have some degree of sleep apnea and about 50% of men over 30 have some degree of sleep apnea. And the worse the sleep apnea is, the more significant what we call morbidities are associated with morbidities would be things such as developing congestive heart failure, stroke, certain cancers, depression, weight gain, diabetes. These are things that are associated with untreated sleep apnea. Then there's something we call mortality. Mortality reality is how long you will live. A 20 year study done in Wisconsin followed people. They first randomly selected people and they tested to see whether or not they had sleep apnea, not in a sleep clinic, and they followed them for 20 years. And the people that had severe sleep apnea were three times as likely to die if untreated than the people that did not have sleep apnea. So it's really critical that if you have sleep apnea particularly severe, that you know about it and you treat it because it affects your morbidity, mortality, your disease and your survivability. The paid the study for the Wisconsin state was ages 30 to 60. So these were people relatively young. So the first step is if you have answered the questionnaire, the stop bang questionnaire, or somebody that's your bed partner, notice that you snore, maybe you stop breathing, we don't know do you have apnea or not. And it's called an apnea hypopnea index. And it's measured either in a sleep lab which has been the gold standard for decades, or with an at home device. I'm just going to briefly tell you the difference. If you're pretty healthy and you don't have any significant medical conditions, the at home devices are considered good enough, not inferior, superior to a sleep lab. Potentially there might be people that have other diseases that they're not going to work very good and they would need to do an in hospital sleep lab. The problem with in hospital sleep lab is kind of inconvenient. It's pretty expensive. Insurance may or may not cover it. So a lot of people choose for the at home devices. This is an example one called the watchpat. It's a watch that goes on your wrist. There's a finger monitor that measures what's called your pulse amplitude and your pulse station. And there's a device that goes in your chest and you wear this at night and once you hook it up to your phone and once you go to sleep, you start it and once you get up in the morning, you stop it and your doctor gets a report the next morning. So that's the easy way to see if you have sleep apnea. If somebody has significant other what we call comorbidities, we would recommend doing a sleep lab. If you've already had a sleep study, obviously you don't need to do it again. Sleep apnea generally does not go away. So that's step one is seeing how much sleep apnea you have, if at all. And then it also measures things like the how loud you snore and how many hours a night you snore. Do you have, you have times where your oxygen desaturates, how much restlessness you have and how much quality of sleep do you have. These are all really important. We're understanding more now the importance of quality sleep than ever. When you sleep, there's certain stages of sleep that convert your daytime memories into long term memories. And this is when people get mental fogginess or forgetfulness is frequently a result of poor sleeping. And numerous studies have shown that if you don't get good quality sleep, it affects the longevity of your life and your health. So sleep is very important. So when you come in, we'll assess you and look in your airway and see if you're candidate for the apnea lays and night lays. We typically recommend you get a sleep study if you haven't had it done and we can do it, you know, you can do it same day and get the results tomorrow and schedule your procedure. If you decide to move forward with the apnea lays procedure or the night lays procedure. The apnea lase is for apnea. The night lase is for snoring is basically the same procedure. The original night lace procedure was really more of a minor procedure to get the snoring reduced. But we use the apnea lace technique for pretty much all sleep disorder breathing because it works much better. When you do the procedure, it's done. You can drive yourself here. There's no sedation needed, no topical anesthetics. It's a little hot and a little spicy when you're getting laser done. But you can tolerate without anything. For pain. You have to open your mouth for a while so it gets uncomfortable. Just like at the dentist office. You can take breaks and wet your mouth. Prepare for it. You want to have good, good hydration because what laser does attack water whenever you open your mouth. And they'll do two passes of. I'm sorry, do two different lasers at the same time. So we do the base of base of the tongue, the floor of the mouth, underneath your tongue and the back of your throat. We use one laser to preheat the tissues and another laser to kind of smack heat down. That stimulates collagen growth and tightens things up. So it tightens things up back the way they were. After that, your mouth might feel a little dry, a little scratchy, but there's really no downtime. You can eat right afterwards. Again, you can drive yourself home. You don't need a driver or pain medication. And the procedure is typically repeated about every two weeks for three times. So plan on doing this three times if you have snoring or apnea and then assess do you need more treatments or not? Now, the reason we say three treatments is that clinical studies show that at three sessions, virtually everybody responds to some degree. And the average improvement of apnea is about 60, 70%. So that's a pretty good improvement. Somebody with severe sleep apnea from onset, somebody who has severe sleep apnea will likely need more than three treatments because 70% better might not be good enough. And we can always remeasure that. So we plan to do three treatments and determine if you need to do more treatments or not. We'll give you some advice how you can measure without doing another test, but you can always at that point, do another watch pat test. They're pretty inexpensive, so that's a simple thing to do and see if you need more treatments. Really want to get that score down to normal or mild at the very least. So if you're interested in doing the sleep the night laser app and lase procedure, it's a minimum of three treatments about two weeks apart. If you can stretch it out more than that, we generally don't do any sooner than that. So with a laser, and laser is very specialized to treat this condition. And the durability of the results, we don't quite know that yet. Studies show that durability is probably 24 to 36 months, but there hasn't been studies longer term than that. In reality, sleep apnea is a disease of aging, and we are probably going to continue aging. So you're probably going to develop some sleep apnea. Again, if you had mild sleep apnea, particularly, it progresses to moderate and severe as time goes on. So you may need additional treatments. Maybe do it a tune up every year for one treatment. It would be reasonable. Or you can just test every year and see if you can sleep apnea bad. So for your own health, if you do have sleep apnea or a concern that you do, I would test for it. I think everybody should be screened. The sleep apnea leads to dementia, Alzheimer's disease, certain cancers, heart disease, stroke, and we're thinking about longevity and living a healthier, longer life. We don't want to have something that we can totally control, like our sleep, be left alone and ignore it. And the gold standard for sleep apnea is using the CPAP machine. That's the device that goes in your mouth that helps force air in. And that's really an option for you. And that may be covered by your insurance. The sleep lays. I'm sorry, the night lays and apnea lays are not covered by insurance. It's really too new for them to recognize. And I don't see that happen in the next few years. So this will be paid out of pocket. It's not very expensive. And this is really for the people that want to treat their sleep apnea if they have it, or they want to treat their snoring if they have it. And they don't want to wear a device every night. So thank you very much.