Apart from waking up feeling like a million bucks, how often does this happen? A goods night rest gives our body a chance to repair, replenish and restore all of our vital functions including circulation, respiration and immune system. It reduces stress and inflammation, keeps your heart healthy, improves your memory and best of all, keeps you awake and alert during those boring work meetings or lectures. It also plays a major role in our oral health by fighting off infections and fortifying your teeth. There are adverse effects that can occur during your sleep, which can have a negative impact on your oral health. Sleeping helps repair your cardiovascular system and blood vessels from any damage sustained throughout the day allowing for essential nutrients, such as calcium and phosphate, to be transported successfully to bone tissue of your teeth. Our immune system is what protects us from getting illnesses by fending off harmful bacteria and infections. The same process applies to the bacteria in your mouth.
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Try out PMC Labs and tell us what you think. Learn More. Oral health practitioners routinely perform oral health assessments for the dental patient to determine if oral disease is present. Systemic health is often a contributor to oral health concerns. One area in particular that has a direct effect on oral structures and oral health is poor sleep quality and open mouth breathing. Sleep is a fundamental process of the human body, which regulates core biological functions. A person who does not obtain quality sleep can exhibit a wide range of oral, systemic, and cognitive health problems.
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If this only occurs occasionally, it will not have a major impact on your health in the long term. However, structural sleeping problems can seriously impair your health and general wellbeing. Not only does it increase the risk of accidents on, for example, the road due to tiredness. Several serious medical conditions are associated with reduced sleep and poor sleeping quality as well, such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and mental problems, for instance, anxiety or depression. It is now suggested that poor sleep is also related to several oral health problems. But how do we define poor sleep? Sleep quality is also very important. This is determined by aspects such as the ability to fall asleep, stay asleep throughout the night without waking up too often, and fall back asleep quickly in case you do wake up. There are several factors influencing sleep duration and sleep quality, and one of them is our oral health.
Sleep apnea affects 18 million Americans, though people may not be aware that they are experiencing it. Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition in which you stop breathing in the middle of your sleep, due to obstruction in your airway when your soft tissues collapse naturally. Your brain will rouse you awake whether or not you are conscious so that the airway is unblocked. With obstructive sleep apnea, this poor quality of sleep leads to a number of issues during the waking hours, from drowsiness and daytime fatigue to irritation and concentration problems. More severe cases could lead to a number of more serious medical consequences, such as cardiovascular issues. The symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea are: loud or frequent snoring, silent pauses in breathing, choking or gasping sounds, daytime sleepiness or fatigue, unrefreshing sleep, insomnia, or morning headaches, to name a few. Oral appliance therapy is one form of treatment that is effective and convenient.
