Childhood Sleep Apnea Can Lead to More Issues

Sleeping is a unique phase of our existence. And yet approximately one third of our population has a sleep disorder of some kind. Snoring and sleep apnea are common sleep disorders, but not ones that should be taken lightly.

Part of what happens with snoring and with sleep apnea, is that your oxygen levels go down while you're sleeping. If your oxygen levels go down, your body can't get into the restorative deep stages of sleep that are necessary for the repair to occur.

And for a child, one event in a night is enough of an occurrence to have a child diagnosed as a sleep apnic. That cascades into a whole lot of other things such as bedwetting and attention deficit disorder and other things of that nature.

Parents, physicians and other sleep apnea dentists may think "Gosh, the kids are grinding their teeth." Around the age of five, six, seven, eight is the transitional stage of dentition and many structural and functional occurrences are happen. During that transitional dentition that's coming and going, they're struggling for oxygen.

They have potential collapse of airway. And there are just a lot of hormonal things. When they're grinding their teeth, kids cannot go. That's a stage two in the sleep cycle and can't get down into REM stage. And that's true of adults, also.

Bruxism or teeth grinding is one of the things that we look for is worn down teeth. We will see that in kids that are eight years old, nine years old, ten years old. Their baby teeth are as flat as this table top. That's not normal and they are not supposed to be that way. And what is the reason for this? Perhaps they have got some kind of disturbance going on physiologically that's bothering them. Or maybe they have pinworms or perhaps some other nutritional deficiency.

It is likely they have got an airway disturbance which is causing a backup of pressure in their Eustachian tubes, so they're trying to clear their airway, clear their ears as a result of the clogged airway.

GERD, gastric esophageal reflux disease, has been definitively linked to obstructive sleep apnea. So we see that as worn down teeth that has the enamel eroded off of the teeth. As well as headaches, oral facial pain or a coated or slashed scalloped tongue. My fingers, for instance, would be typed scallop. We look at a tongue and we'll look for all the indentations and the depressions into the tongue. So that is a functional and visual manifestation. A functional problem going on such could be an enlarged uvula and enlarged tonsils. So those are some of the things that we see and we look for.

What do we do in dentistry to help childhood sleep apnea? Part of it depends on what it is that is the problem. The answers to the questions come with diagnostics, sometimes we will have people referred in from a medical doctor. If you suspect your child has sleep apnea, see your physician or a sleep apnea dentist.