If you are searching for a dentist about sleep apnea, you should know in the first paragraph what this office does and does not do, rather than after a phone call.
We do not diagnose sleep apnea, and we do not make the appliances. No mandibular advancement devices, no oral appliance therapy. Diagnosis needs a sleep study and that belongs with a physician.
What we do is the part a dentist is genuinely placed to do: look at the anatomy, find out whether your nose actually passes air, and treat the function. That last one is where most of our useful work happens, and it is the reason this page exists rather than a list of appliances we do not sell.
Why a dentist is looking at this at all
Because some of the things that contribute to a narrow airway are sitting in plain view at a dental exam, and because the teeth keep a record.
Worn teeth are the clearest example. A study sent thirty dental patients with tooth wear for proper sleep testing and found a mean apnea-hypopnea index of 32.4, which is the severe range. Only two of the thirty came back under five.
Duran-Cantolla J, Alkhraisat MH, Martinez-Null C, et al. Frequency of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome in dental patients with tooth wear. J Clin Sleep Med. 2015;11(4):445-450. Thirty patients, 77% male, mean age 58, recruited from a dental practice. A small and selected sample, so read it as a reason to ask the question rather than as a population rate.
That is not a diagnosis and we are not going to present it as one. It is a reason that, when we see a worn dentition or a mouth that is obviously dry every morning, we ask about your sleep instead of quietly making you an appliance. Why that matters before a night guard is its own page.
The diagnosis comes first, and then the anatomy means something
This is the ordering that gets reversed constantly, and reversing it is how people end up spending a year on the wrong thing.
There is a great deal of anatomy we can assess and it is genuinely worth assessing: a narrow or high palate, which is the floor of your nose as much as the roof of your mouth; how much room the tongue has and where it rests; tonsils; the shape and position of the jaws; whether the nose passes air on both sides.
But those findings are interpreted in the light of a diagnosis rather than in place of one. A narrow palate in somebody with a normal sleep study means something different from a narrow palate in somebody with an apnea-hypopnea index of 40. The same finding, two different conversations, and only one of them leads anywhere useful.
So the sequence we would argue for is: get the sleep study, then bring us the number. With a diagnosis in hand, an anatomical assessment becomes a real contribution to your care. Without one, it is an interesting observation about your mouth.
Where the anatomy turns out to be the main event, that is a referral rather than something we do here. We work closely with an orthodontist who performs palatal expansion and facilitates jaw advancement surgery, and we have written at length about where those genuinely fit and where the claims made for them outrun the evidence.
Myofunctional therapy: the part we actually do
This is the core of what we offer on the breathing side, and it is worth explaining properly because it is easy to dismiss as exercises.
Myofunctional therapy is physical therapy for the tongue, lips and swallow. No appliance, no surgery, nothing to wear. A set of exercises, done daily, that rebuild strength and change a resting position you may have held for decades. Dr. Lee-Mirzayan is certified in it and runs it here. The full description of the program is here.
The mechanism is not mysterious. The airway is a space, and how open it stays depends partly on the skeletal container around it and partly on the tone and position of the soft tissue inside it. Surgery and expansion work on the container. Myofunctional therapy works on the contents, and the contents are the half that most treatments leave untouched.
What the evidence actually shows
We are going to give you both of the recent reviews, including the fact that they disagree, because the disagreement is the useful part.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in the Laryngoscope pooled seven randomized trials and 310 patients and found statistically significant improvements in the apnea-hypopnea index of -10.2 events per hour, along with less daytime sleepiness, better sleep quality and better minimum oxygen saturation.
A 2025 systematic review and network meta-analysis pooled fifteen randomized trials and reached a more cautious answer. It confirmed the improvements in sleepiness, sleep quality, arousals and snoring intensity, but its pooled change in the apnea-hypopnea index was -8.73 events per hour with a confidence interval running from -21.19 to +3.74, which is not statistically significant.
Saba ES, Kim H, Huynh P, Jiang N. Orofacial myofunctional therapy for obstructive sleep apnea: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Laryngoscope. 2024;134(1):480-495. Xu Y, Yang R, Yu M, Gao X. Efficacy of myofunctional therapy for obstructive sleep apnea: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. J Evid Based Dent Pract. 2025;25(3):102137.
Notice that the two point estimates barely differ: -10.2 against -8.73. What differs is the precision. One analysis is confident the effect is real and the other cannot rule out zero. That is what a genuine but variable treatment looks like in the literature, and it is a long way from either the enthusiasm or the dismissal you will find elsewhere.
The 2025 review also offers the most practically useful finding of either: when daily training exceeded thirty minutes, the improvement in the apnea-hypopnea index did reach significance. Which is a plausible way to reconcile the two, and a clear statement about what this asks of you. This is not a treatment that works because you agreed to it. It works on the days you do it.
Two honest consequences. Roughly half of people respond strongly and the rest barely move, so nobody can tell you in advance which you will be, which is why we measure a lip seal time at the start and compare it later rather than asking how you feel it is going. And the benefit needs months of consistent daily practice, so the sessions are the start of the work rather than the whole of it.
If you are not going to get a sleep study
Some people will not, and we would rather talk to them honestly than lose them at the door.
The reasons are usually practical rather than stubborn. You do not want a diagnosis on your record. You have been through a study before and will not do it again. You tried CPAP and could not tolerate it. You cannot face the cost or the wait. Whatever the reason, telling you that we can do nothing until you comply is both untrue and a good way to make sure nothing improves.
So here is the honest version of what remains available to you.
- Getting the nose working. Saline rinses, treating allergy properly rather than seasonally, and an ENT opinion when the obstruction looks structural. A nose that passes air is the precondition for everything else, and this is worth doing whether or not anybody ever measures your sleep.
- Myofunctional therapy. The review above concluded it is a reasonable option for people who cannot tolerate CPAP or other established treatments, which is a large share of exactly this group. It is reversible, it involves no appliance and no surgery, and the worst case is that you have spent some months on daily exercises.
- Releasing a genuine tether. No amount of therapy helps a tongue that physically cannot reach the palate. A release is sometimes the precondition rather than the treatment.
- The unglamorous levers. Sleep timing, evening light exposure, late meals, weight where it is part of the picture, and not sleeping flat on your back. None of these require a diagnosis and all of them act on the same system.
- Protecting the teeth from what is already happening. If your teeth are wearing, that damage is real regardless of what is causing it, and it can be managed on its own terms.
What none of that can do is tell you how bad it is. Everything on that list is reasonable, low risk, and blind. If you have severe apnea, these measures are not treating it, and the cardiovascular and metabolic consequences of severe untreated apnea are not things a tongue exercise reaches. We will say that plainly every time, and then we will still help with the parts we can help with.
And if the thing standing between you and a sleep study is the idea of the appointment rather than the test, that is a different problem with its own answer. We wrote about that too.
Mouth breathing is the part we can treat
For a fair number of people who arrive asking about snoring, the clearest finding is not apnea at all. It is that they have not breathed through their nose properly in years.
That matters on its own, separately from anything a sleep study would show. Air moving across the front teeth all night dries them at the one time salivary flow is already near zero, which is a direct route to decay and to gum inflammation that stops exactly where the airflow stops. The full account of what chronic mouth breathing does is here, including which of the effects are well established and which are not.
This is squarely a dental problem with a dental answer, and it is the part of the airway conversation where we are most confident we can help.
Who does what
| This | Them or us |
|---|---|
| Diagnosing sleep apnea, and grading how severe it is | A physician, with a sleep study. Not us. |
| CPAP, and managing it | A physician. Not us. |
| Mandibular advancement and other oral appliances | A dentist who provides them. Not this office. |
| Palatal expansion, jaw advancement surgery | An orthodontist and a surgeon, and we refer and coordinate. |
| Assessing the anatomy and whether your nose passes air | Us, and most usefully once you have a diagnosis. |
| Myofunctional therapy | Us. |
| Tongue-tie release where it is limiting the tongue | Us. |
| The dental damage from mouth breathing and grinding | Us. |
Where to start
If you snore, wake unrefreshed, wake with a dry mouth, or somebody has watched you stop breathing, the first call is to a physician about a sleep study. That is the step that makes everything after it more useful.
If you have a diagnosis already and want the anatomy and the function looked at, or you are not going to pursue a study and want to know what is genuinely available, that is a conversation worth having. Call 702-734-0776 or tell us what is going on.