What are the Surgical Treament for Sleep Apnea?

Surgical approaches to treatment of sleep apnea. The first one I'm going to discuss is sleep apnea jaw surgery by an oral surgeon. If anatomically the jaws are recruited or small, the size and shape is not appropriate to give space for your tongue. An oral surgeon working with an orthodontist may do what they call orthognathic surgery, where they they move the lower jaw forward surgically, and then the orthodontist finishes things up with braces to make things look better. And many times this will will help the many times this will help as far as as far as facial features and profile as the lower jaw moves forward into a better position, it can be a very nice cosmetic procedure. Okay, there are some obscure treatments, such as reducing the size of the tongue. Okay, now, there's one more surgical approach, which is not nice, which is not going to be used too much by the population watching and listening to this. And that's using a trach, where they open the airway up this This may be done with people who are living in institutions who will not use a CPAP machine or do oral appliance therapy or do any other type of therapy on their own, they may need to have the assistance of a trach. Okay, then, aside from that type of oral surgery, okay, there's a sleep apnea operation, okay, called Inspire that's done by Nt physicians, in which they, under the skin, they put a lead to your ribs, and another lead up to the nerve that controls the position of your tongue. And if your ribs are moving up and down, when you breathe, okay, it will detect that you're not breathing, and it'll trigger the nerve that controls your tongue.

So pull your tongue forward and out of the airway. So that's a relatively new procedure that is performed by EMT physicians, that has a pretty high success rate. Okay. And you may want to discuss that within the NT physician who does that type of procedure. Okay. Other procedures that are done by your auntie doc or a surgeon might be a tonsillectomy might be taking the adenoids out may include surgical turbinate reduction or septum repair. Okay, and those are a couple of the other surgical procedures that are done. Now on kids, okay. We look inside the mouth, especially on infants to see whether their tongue tied or not. And if they're tongue tied, they'll usually outgrow it. But in the early formative years, when they are not, when they haven't outgrown the tongue tie, the tongue is held back, it can't come forward. Okay, and it has nowhere to go other than the back of the throat. Most people don't recognize that. Unless Unless there's a mother and the mother trying to breastfeed, the baby can't latch. Okay, because the tongue has to engage along with the upper lip in order for them to successfully breastfeed, so they'll come in to the office and have that procedure done, where the tongue tie is relieved. Okay, mom can feel great about being able to breastfeed again. And not knowing that they were doing this procedure, not knowing how beneficial this procedure is for possibly avoiding sleep apnea in the future. They do it and they do it for the for the They, they do it to enhance the ability to breastfeed. I've done this procedure on infants, the youngest was seven days old. And that's a nice procedure that sets them up for growth and development. Okay, along with that, there are tongue exercises that are done by either a speech therapist or a myofunctional therapist who is trained in how to do this to these exercises for your tongue to help get it out of the airway. And that may be useful no matter what procedure you're having done for your primary treatment. It's a good adjunctive therapy to have what's done myofunctional therapy which is made up of tongue exercises for treatment of sleep apnea.