Transcription
Hi everyone, it's Dr. Dan Gartenberg here again, and I'm reporting back on my recent trials and tribulations dealing with my own personal issues with sleep apnea.
So, last time we dropped off here, I was evaluating my sleep apnea using a new device called Wesper, which can enable you to see your breathing health from the comfort of your home and also connect you with an MD who can actually give you the diagnosis. So, I went through the whole process with Wesper. I evaluated my sleep over 3 days, and I actually got the diagnosis from my MD that they connected me with through their system.
From there, I went on to, you know, show the diagnosis to my dentist and actually get insurance to bill out for making a device called a mandibular advancement device. I got one made by Panthera. It was sort of a difficult process, and insurance actually only ended up paying for half of it because I have an EPO. But if you have a PPO, they should generally pay for about 80-90%. It's sort of like a mouthguard, but it's designed to push out the bottom of your mouth. And there's a lot of, you know, hundreds of randomized control trials showing that this can work from mild to moderate cases of sleep apnea, which was what the Wesper device showed that I had.
So, it took a couple of weeks, but the doctor, my dentist, made this device. And so I'll just demo now. Put it in the wrong way. Goes in like this at night. Somewhere mouthguard, and you see it pushes out the bottom of my jaw here.
So, now the next step, the next logical step, and what a dentist should do after they make this device is they should evaluate that it's actually working. Because there is a possibility that, you know, for whatever reason, you get this treatment, it doesn't work. You know, in that case, it's more likely you definitely need a CPAP. You know, if you had a more severe issue, as mine, you know, it's recommended CPAP is the first line defense. There's other treatment options available too, and obviously consult your doctor and all this stuff. But generally speaking, the main treatments are CPAP, mandibular advancement device. There's other things like Inspire, and your ENT can actually have some solutions for you as well.
So, now I had to, you know, use Wesper again to actually validate that this device was working to treat my sleep apnea. So, if you recall from last time, I had a moderate case of apnea. You can see here, if you're looking at the apnea-hypopnea index at the bottom right, right over here. There's basically a less conservative metric and a more conservative metric. When you have an oxygen desaturation of 3%, that's in the top. It's a little less conservative. It's basically when your blood oxygenation drops by 3%, and that is indicative of a hypopnea event or an instance where I'm not breathing at night. You know, ideally, the cutoff here is five per hour. If you're less than that, you're actually considered to not have sleep apnea. Even though I've talked to a bunch of doctors, some of them about this, and you know, really not breathing four times an hour at night probably isn't ideal for health. You know, to be super healthy, you probably want to get this down to like one or two or zero. But, you know, generally sleeping, you're not going to get diagnosed or treated if it's less than five.
So, on the less conservative metric, I had 13.2. So that would still be a mild case. And on the conservative metric of a 4% desaturation in oxygenation, I had 7.8 here is what it's showing. So, this is definitely a mild case. This is actually the worst night of the three nights that I've tracked. And this is when I knew I had to do something to treat this underlying problem. You know, I would also try to do weight loss strategies and whatnot, but there's not always, you know, time or effort for that. And first and foremost, you want to, you know, get treated, and that'll actually help the whole, you know, you'll have more energy, then you'll be more likely to exercise, it'll help your whole system.
So, I finally got the device and I, bear with me here, and I retested, and this is what you want to see. So, basically, what we're seeing here is that the device is working. So, on the AHI, I was just in the mild range when I did this again, 5.5 events per hour for the conservative metric, and you know, only 2.1 events per hour in the, not in the conservative metric, the other one, the less conservative one was 5.5 events per hour. So, this is basically showing that I effectively treated my sleep apnea with this device.
I think the next step for me is I'm going to actually try to do the weight loss component of this and then possibly retest without wearing anything at all to see where I'm at. But that's the cool thing about, you know, using this device, Wesper. You can get it for $67 a month, basically. And there's going to be a link to that in the video below, and you'll be able to troubleshoot and get real tangible data on how to actually improve your breathing health at night. So, that's why I really like to use it. And you don't have to use it every night, just periodically taking baselines of your sleep health in order to figure out the next step to see what's working and what's not working in order to improve your sleep, which can obviously have a massive impact on your life and well-being.
So, that's it for my journey, and there will be another video pending, hopefully when I lose some weight and retest for my sleep apnea. Have a great sleep.