Keeping Your Partner Awake at Night? It May Be Time to Try Oral Appliance Therapy

Obstructive sleep apnea is a long-term disorder that minimizes your quality of sleep by inhibiting your intake of oxygen. It’s the result of tissues surrounding your throat and airways collapsing when you relax, which limits the flow of oxygen to and from your lungs.

The symptoms of sleep apnea at night include pauses in breathing and sometimes snoring. During the day, you experience tiredness, fatigue, headaches, and trouble concentrating. Your daytime symptoms might not affect anyone else besides yourself, but if you sleep near a partner, they can lose sleep over your snoring or pauses in breathing.

Here at Sleep Cycle Center in Austin and Lakeway, Texas, our experts Chad Denman, DDS, Vidya Pai, MD, and Michael Lund, DDS, can restore you and your partner’s healthy sleep cycles by treating your sleep apnea with evidence-based oral appliance therapy.

Here’s how oral appliance therapy can stop you from keeping your partner awake at night.

Why do you snore?

Not everyone with obstructive sleep apnea snores, but some people do. Snoring is the sound of air escaping through tiny openings between tissues. As the air escapes, the tissues vibrate together causing the sound of a snore.

Snoring alone does not always indicate obstructive sleep apnea. Home sleep testing from Sleep Cycle Center tells you more about your sleep pattern and any problems happening as you slumber, such as airway blockages indicative of obstructive sleep apnea.

How an oral appliance works

Oral appliances for sleep apnea are custom-designed devices that work by positioning your jaw forward as you wear them. That holds your airway open so you can breathe.

No tissue blockages don’t just mean fewer pauses in breathing while you sleep. It also means a quieter sleep for both you and your partner. Because of the way your oral appliance positions your mouth, the air has plenty of room to enter and exit your lungs without causing noisy tissue vibrations that keep your partner awake.

There are a few types of oral appliances that help treat obstructive sleep apnea and the first you try isn’t always the best option. With help from our experts, you can find a suitable device that improves your breathing while promoting a more peaceful sleep for your partner, too.

Alternative options

When it comes to treating sleep apnea, one of the most common options is continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). CPAP may be an effective way to manage sleep apnea for some, but it doesn’t solve the problem of a loud sleeper. It may help stop snoring, but the CPAP device makes a sound that might also keep your partner awake at night.

Get started today

If your snoring disrupts your partner’s sleep, it might be time to give oral appliance therapy a try. Give us a call or schedule an appointment online at Sleep Cycle Center today.