Oral appliances can be a great solution for a range of problems, including teeth grinding, sleep apnea, snoring, and some bite and jaw position misalignments. We also recommend a sports guard for anyone playing contact sports or sports where there’s a chance of damage to the teeth from equipment.
Oceana Dental will recommend the right type of appliance for your specific needs and goals, and will ensure it is custom fitted with care. We’d be happy to talk to you about how we can help you achieve better oral health.
Achieving Better Health With Oral Appliances
We provide dental appliances to protect your teeth and improve a number of conditions.
Sleep apnea mouth guards
When your breathing pauses during sleep, it’s called sleep apnea. For some people, these pauses can happen dozens or even hundreds of times a night, and the lack of deep sleep can lead to fatigue, heart issues, stroke, difficulties with memory and cognition, and other problems.
There are three types of sleep apnea, and two of them involve part or full blockages in the airway, usually due to the tongue and soft palate shifting to close the back of the throat.
The right sleep apnea appliance can keep the tongue and soft tissue in place while you sleep, and keep you breathing freely throughout the night.
The Canadian Thoracic Society (CTS) as well as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) suggest, as a front-line treatment, the use of dental device.
Dental devices are helpful in the treatment of simple snoring, and in cases of light to moderate obstructive apnea or with patients who are can’t or won’t use of a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). Advancement devices can also be used with CPAP machine, as they increase the therapeutic efficiency of one another.
Teeth grinding and clenching appliances
Some of us clench our jaws or grind our teeth during sleep. Dentists call this “bruxism”, and it can cause serious wear and tear on the teeth (which leads to further issues), and a sore jaw and headaches when you wake up.
Additionally, recent research is telling us that there is often underlying causes to grinding, such as sleep breathing disorders, acid reflux and more. In many cases, finding and fixing the underlying causes will enable you to stop grinding your teeth, and stop wearing the appliance.
Our dental laboratories can create a customized night guard from an impression of your teeth—the right fit is more comfortable and ensures it stays in the correct position at night. We use a clear dental acrylic for our night guards that’s thick enough to provide great protection, and it’s also durable and easy to clean. Once we’ve double checked that the fit is perfect, you can look forward to significant relief from the effects of grinding.
Mouth guards for sports
We definitely recommend a sports guard for anyone playing hockey, lacrosse, football, rugby or other sports where there’s a risk of damage to the teeth. Growing kids will need their guards replaced more frequently, so be sure to ask your child about the fit regularly.
A perfect fit delivers best results
When it comes to sports guards, store-bought mouth guards are better than nothing, but we encourage you to invest in a custom fitted guard from a dentist. “Boil and bite” or over-the-counter mouth guards don’t last as long as custom fitted ones, can fit imprecisely, and can lose their shape. Many are made from plastics that can don’t reduce the force of incoming blows as effectively.
A custom-fitted guard is based on an impression taken by a dentist, and the mould is sent to a lab where the guard is created. There is no chance that the fit can be affected by slippage during the moulding process, as there is with a “boil and bite” type. When we shape our mouth guards, we also account for the ideal position of the teeth and jaw to help encourage good structure. Our guards always have the appropriate thickness and are latex-free and easy to clean.