If you frequently wake up during the night to go to the bathroom or experience restless sleep, you might benefit from an appliance designed to improve your nighttime breathing. As we sleep, our muscles completely relax, and if the tongue falls back into the throat, it can obstruct airflow, often leading to snoring or gasping for breath. These instances are oxygen-related sleep disturbances. Grinding and clenching are thought by some to be reflexes of the body trying to get more oxygen. While night guards intended for these issues protect your teeth, they can worsen the problem by pushing the lower jaw back, adding stress to the TMJ and jaw muscles, and reducing airway space.

We offer custom appliances that fit on the lower teeth allowing freedom of the lower jaw as well as providing protection from grinding and clenching with limited interference of tongue space. Additionally we offer FDA approved mandibular advancement devices that fit on both the upper and lower jaws, connected by a hinge or band to maintain continuous airflow by holding the lower jaw in an optimal position. This option is a medically approved treatment for sleep apnea used in coordination with your physician and is often covered by insurance with a sleep apnea diagnosis.

Separately, orthodontic arch development may be recommended to address crowding and malocclusion. That treatment is described on our orthodontics pages and is provided for orthodontic purposes.

To assess your airway, we use our ECCO pharyngometer machine, specially designed to evaluate the health of your nasal and oral airways as well as how they would respond to appliances or airway orthodontic approaches that position the jaw forward. every patient is different. The right approach depends on the examination and diagnosis and where breathing or sleep is involved, coordination with your medical provider.