I’ve just passed the one month point of wearing my Vivos mRNA Appliance®, so here is an update.
Overall, everything is going reasonably smoothly and the data from my CPAP machine is encouraging. I haven’t noticed any major changes in my daytime symptoms yet, but it’s still early days of a treatment that I anticipate will take 2 years.
This is a list of online resources I found helpful when researching palate expansion options for potentially curing my obstructive sleep apnea. The number of links reflects the amount of research I did on each option; those I explored in more detail have their own pages and are compared in this article.
To understand how and why this treatment approach works, read what really causes obstructive sleep apnea. Most options here are non-surgical or require only minimal surgical assistance; for surgical options see Surgical Options For Obstructive Sleep Apnea Resource Bookmarks.
This is a list of resources I found helpful when evaluating whether the Anterior Growth Guidance Appliance (AGGA) was the best palate expansion option for expanding my airway and potentially curing my obstructive sleep apnea.
I rated AGGA high risk in my comparison of maxillary expansion options to treat my obstructive sleep apnea, and since then I’ve heard of many failed cases and a couple of lawsuits, so beware. (more…)
This is a list of resources I found helpful when evaluating whether Theodore Belfor’s Homeoblock palate expansion appliance was the best option for expanding my airway and potentially curing my obstructive sleep apnea. (more…)
This is a list of resources I found helpful when evaluating whether Won Moon’s Microimplant Assisted Rapid Palatal Expander (MARPE) named Maxillary Skeletal Expander (MSE) was the best option for expanding my airway and potentially curing my obstructive sleep apnea. (more…)
Last Updated: 10 December 2022.
When I asked the sleep specialist who diagnosed me with severe obstructive sleep apnea what the cause of my condition was, he said that the muscles in my airway collapse during sleep. The Mayo Clinic, WebMD and Healthline all agree, but in my mind this doesn’t really identify the root cause. So I asked why my airway was too small to tolerate the collapse of the muscles in it, and he replied with: genetics.
I thought that sounded a bit odd given that neither of my parents suffered from obstructive sleep apnea, and as far as I was aware we had no family history of it. One of my siblings has since been diagnosed with it, at least one cousin has it, and I’m pretty sure my mother had it before she died but I wasn’t successful in getting her tested. Nevertheless, at the time I was determined to take my root cause analysis further because I thought that knowing the underlying cause would better inform me as to what the best treatment for the condition might be.