Dr. Katie To explains how dentists catch sleep-disordered breathing before other doctors do. When oxygen drops from 98% to 80% at night, your heart rate spikes and stress on the heart rises, increasing heart-attack risk during sleep. Routine sleep screening and oral appliance therapy can prevent these events.
And a lot of patients that show up with a lot of autoimmune or inflammations, they don't know they sleep have problem. No doctor ever asked them question about sleep questionnaires. No doctor ever prescribed home sleep test for them. Most often dentist, the one who stents, is the first one asking, screening, and prescribing home sleep test. And so indirectly, we save a lot of lives. Because most people, especially men, have heart attack in the sleep. Why? The heart gave out. They could not do this anymore every night, dropping to like 80% of oxygen versus 98, 99. Their heart rates go up, their body under stress, right? And so we as a water dentist obligate to screen for sleep. It's a part of our protocol. It's a part of our practice. And so everybody come in here know that. And they actually so used to us asking about it, they report it first. Ba ba ba. Like, yeah, I wake up refreshed. Oh no, I'm not. So we love that because with sleep, it requires a whole village. We have ENTs that we work with. We have orthodontists that are airway-focused. We have oral surgeons that are airway-focused. We have periodontists that are doing procedures, the expanding job with, you know, bone expansion. And we have sleep medicine doctor that collaborate with us. So transition patient from PAPs or CPAP machines to appliance so the patients can actually enjoy more quality of life, more comfortable. A functional therapist, chiropractor, I mean, you name it. There's a lot of professional involved in treating a sleep patient.
