Breathing is a necessity for living; the act of taking in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide is essential to everything our bodies do to survive. Your respiratory system is the part of your body that makes this possible through your airways (nose, mouth, throat, trachea), lungs, and blood vessels, which are also there to allow you to smell, protect airways from harmful substances, and warm the air to match body temperature. The oxygen your body gets from this process makes it possible for your organs to work.
Problems affecting breathing can be potentially dangerous, especially when sleeping. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a chronic condition that not only affects your breathing while sleeping but also leads to a range of symptoms you struggle with throughout the day. The treatments for managing this sleep disorder often include mouthpieces and airway devices like Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines; however, Inspire® is a method that is less cumbersome and intrusive with solid results.
Let’s look at what this method can do for your sleep by examining what obstructive sleep apnea is, how Inspire works to manage it, and the requirements needed to undergo this treatment
If you live in the Lake Oswego, Oregon, area and you’re struggling with breathing problems that affect your sleep, the team of doctors at Lake Grove ENT can help you find the solution that gets you better rest.
Your body needs to undergo a sleep cycle when resting overnight, which consists of four stages: light sleep, deeper sleep, slow wave sleep, and REM sleep. Assuming you get the necessary 8-hour rest most people need (which varies by age), you’re likely to go through these stages at least four or five times. Obstructive sleep apnea makes achieving this very difficult because it prevents proper breathing as you rest because soft tissue blocks your airway, disrupting the sleep cycle.
If air can’t pass through your trachea (windpipe) while sleeping, your body will interrupt sleep to get that air and try to get back into the cycle. The process of studying your apnea events per hour is known as the apnea/hypoxia index (AHI), and because the severity of the condition will vary, mild cases can cause up to 15 apnea events per hour while trying to sleep, and severe cases can cause up to 30 events.
Inspire is the name for a device that’s implanted in a minor surgical procedure to send signals through the nerves to your tongue and upper airway to improve the flow of air while you rest. Generally, a drug-induced sleep endoscopy is used to get a look inside your throat before the implantation of the device to see where the airway collapses. Once done, the implantation procedure is a same-day outpatient process where the stimulation wire is placed around one of the branches of the hypoglossal nerve, a sensing wire is put in along your ribcage to detect breathing, and the device is placed on the upper chest.
It can treat moderate to severe OSA, and in a year, studies have shown a significant reduction of apnea events per hour, leading to better rest.
To be considered for this treatment, there are some things we need to do to determine if you’re a good candidate:
A sleep study as recent as two years ago will be needed to be a candidate for this treatment, and several Inspire sleep clinics refer to us once a study is completed.
Your AHI needs to be between 15 and 65 events per hour, fitting comfortably in the moderate to severe range to be considered for this procedure.
You need to have a body mass index (BMI) of 35 and under, meaning you can be overweight or class 1 obese but no heavier for this to be effective.
Obstructive sleep apnea can cause several other problems with breathing, affect energy levels, and lead to daytime sleepiness, sexual dysfunction, headaches, and insomnia. If you fit the requirements listed above and want to see what Inspire can do for you, make an appointment with our team at Lake Grove ENT today to get better sleep.
