Relationship between a collapsed bite and premature aging,snoring, sleep apnea and more

Someone who has a collapsed bite. I will talk about what the collapsed bite is. Generally leads to. Having chronic headaches, shoulder pain causes snoring as well as sleep apnea. A collapsed bite could be someone who has all of their teeth, as you see this slide here, but the teeth have been shorted or grinded over the years and they have flattened out. Some people could have a collapsed bite because of the fact that they're missing teeth. They're missing number of teeth, and the teeth are basically gone. And they have this collapsed bite condition. Now.

One of the things that I'd like to talk to you about is the progression of the teeth grinding over the years. If you see the first picture there on the left side, which shows about a 55 millimeters dimension, is a computer image of someone at age about 35 that they have been a clencher all of their life. And over the years, by age 45 or 50, they reduce about 7 millimeters of the height of their teeth. So what happens is that basically you see a lot of strains on these muscles right there happening. Okay, the last picture shows about if more like a 13 millimeter loss. And as you can see, this causes a lot of premature aging. Now, the first thing a lot of patients do is they call the plastic surgeon, right? We want to do a facelift. Well, the foundation is gone. The foundation is not there. So one of the things that we really need to. We really need to look at is why this is happening and how we can prevent it from happening. Now, if you look at these images right here, this patient showing in green, it shows that she does not have much tension going on in her face. This one here, she has more tension, and this one here has lot more tension than over here. So what's basically happening is that the muscles of the mastication.

Which controls the jaw, the lower jaw bone of an individual, when the teeth are grinded down, they have to work much harder to bring the surfaces of the teeth together. And as you know, if a muscle is overworked, what happens? It goes into spasm. And a lot of times you see people with chronic headaches, shoulder pain, and so forth. Okay? Now snoring becomes part of the equation. So basically what's happening here is that.

I mean, first of all, the snoring used to be that people really joked about it quite a bit. But you know, I get a lot of calls from patients that either the wife or the husband is snoring, their partner is snoring, and they are always concerned about if there's something that can be done. Snoring is a very serious condition because a lot of times it does lead to, to basically sleep apnea.

And sleep apnea, by definition is when basically you stop breathing anywhere between 10 to 60 seconds. And there are sleep studies that can be done where you go and sleep in basically in a room and they watch your breathing and they see how you breathe and so forth. And then they recommend either a CPAP machine, a bipap machine, or some sort of a dental appliance. Okay. But sleep apnea generally has a lot of issues associated with it. Some of the issues are excessive, obviously daytime sleepiness, driving and accident, work related accidents, diabetes, stroke, memory loss, depression. There are a lot of studies being done right now and there's a lot of association between a sleep apnea and, for example, low testosterone in men, which also leads to erectile dysfunction. It also has shown, you know, a high triglyceride level on patients. So if you go see your dentist or your physician and they're telling you you have a high triglyceride, we need to look at also your bite and see if that is going on, if there's an association. Also, patients who have slowing of sleep apnea, they have low hdl, increased CRP reactive proteins, C reactive protein, which we'll talk about a little bit later on.