Bad Sleep and Sleep Disorders: Tongue Posture

There are a range of sleep disorders that can affect your sleep and impact your health – and your partner. This series of posts will look at these disorders in more depth. Today, we’re focusing on tongue posture.

The Aer Shield is an important part of using an Aer mandibular advancement splint. The Aer Shield is designed to re-position the tongue at night. By using negative pressure, it holds the tongue in the roof of the mouth, ensuring the airway stays open and the user can breathe freely. But what is tongue posture and why is it so important?

Tongue posture refers to how your tongue sits in your mouth. The base of the tongue is attached to the hyoid bone, which is located at the top of the trachea. During sleep, the tongue relaxes, and the hyoid bone drops down, narrowing the air passage and making it more difficult to breathe at night.

The Aer Shield is a tongue repositioning device that sits behind the lips and in front of the teeth. It improves lip seal, ensuring the mouth remains closed during sleep; when the user swallows, the Aer Shield creates negative pressure in the mouth, holding the tongue in the palate. In this position, the hyoid bone and its associated muscles are moved up and forward. This increases the opening of the airway and creates a more open space for inspiratory breathing.  

Poor tongue posture also leads to hyper-laxative throat dilator muscles. This means the muscles in the throat are too relaxed and need support to keep the airway open. The Aer Shield energises these muscles. Over time, they build up the correct tone to ensure correct airway opening. This therapy option provides better long-term relief for obstructive sleep apnoea

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Why the tongue posture shield TPS necessary addition to advancement splints: the TPS allows for sitting of the tongue into the roof of the mouth when you need your airway to be clear base of tongue session.  We also need to make sure the muscles of the tongue hyoid complex are energised. By the correct positioning of the tongue, the hyoid complex moves up and forward, thereby creating a more open airway for inspiratory breathing. Tongue posture shield has the extra advantage of maintaining lip seal in the situation where patient have incompetent lip seal with a repositioning of their lower jaw. This is important in patients 8 + 2 for the lower jaw patients who have an incompetent upper lip as we know it, adding the tongue posture shield to the mandibular repositioning device allows for them to be able to nasal breathing, reverting to old breathing a mandibular repositioning device in their mouth at night.

In summary, the tongue posture shield performs two main functions. Firstly, the tongue posture shield allows for the correct positioning of the tongue into the roof of the mouth by soft palate and here to the portion of the tongue the roof of the mouth. Secondly, the tongue posture shield maintains lip seal, which would otherwise be inadequate from wearing only a mandibular repositioning device. Inadequate lips sealed does not necessarily occur because of the bulk in repositioning devices; on the contrary, even the most light and slim mandibular repositioning device with less than 1 mm thickness over the teeth can still provide the apparent situation where the lip seal is inadequate. The thickness of the device to the comfort of the patient and room for the tongue when patients are re-positioned to a forward from their centric occlusion or their centric relation the extra vertical is necessary due to the overbite of the anterior teeth. The muscles of facial expression become overextended and thus upon relaxation created and that's upon relaxation an open mouth posture is created. The dilator muscles of the throat in patients that have bad tongue posture become hyper-laxative at night. These muscles need support via the correct positioning of the hyoid complex and through this action of the patient at night with negative tongue posture, the dilator muscles of the throat are energised through this activity and we are using the houses states of the patient further enhance their way active during the night. Overtime, these muscles regain a more correct tone for opening the airway at night, thereby the therapy provides better long-term relief for obstructive sleep apnea condition.