A Better Sleep

11/11/2025

11/09/2025

Sleep Meeting Event

You are warmly invited to the inaugural meeting of The Sleep Society, taking place April 24–25 in Kelowna, British Columbia. This first gathering brings together professionals from across the spectrum of sleep science—dentists, physicians, psychologists, sleep technologists, respiratory therapists, researchers, and those working in behavioural medicine, airway management, and sleep-health innovation.

Our goal is simple: to create a collaborative, interdisciplinary space where knowledge is shared, new connections are built, and the science of sleep is advanced in meaningful, practical ways.

Over two days, attendees will hear from a diverse group of speakers presenting on key topics in sleep medicine, including sleep-disordered breathing, insomnia, upper-airway physiology, oral appliance therapy, circadian health, paediatric sleep, and emerging technologies shaping the future of diagnosis and care. Each session is designed to offer immediately useful insights—whether you work clinically, academically, or within related health professions.

The meeting will be held at a Kelowna hotel, with a block of rooms reserved at a special rate for out-of-town attendees. Commercial supporters representing respected companies in the sleep-health space will also be present, offering an opportunity to see the newest tools, devices, and resources available.

This launch event marks the beginning of a broader vision for The Sleep Society: a community where professionals who recognize the importance of sleep can learn, collaborate, and help move the field forward. Whether you are deeply involved in sleep medicine or simply want to expand your understanding, your participation is welcome—and encouraged.

Join us in Kelowna on April 24–25 and be part of the first chapter of something new for our region and beyond. If you are interested in attending, please reach out for registration details or further information.

11/09/2025

How Age Affects Sleep: What Everyone 55+ Should Know
As we get older, sleep changes—often more than we expect. Many people over 55 notice they don’t sleep as deeply, wake more often, or feel less refreshed in the morning. These changes are normal, but they’re also important to understand because good sleep is one of the strongest foundations for healthy aging.
Here’s what actually happens to sleep as we age—and what you can do to improve it.

Why Sleep Changes With Age
Sleep is controlled by two systems:
• Circadian rhythm (your internal clock)
• Sleep drive (your body’s natural pressure to sleep)
Both shift as we get older.
Earlier bedtimes and earlier wake-ups:
Your internal clock gradually moves forward, making you feel tired sooner in the evening—and awake earlier in the morning.
Lower melatonin production:
The hormone that helps you fall asleep naturally declines with age, making it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Common Sleep Issues After 55
1. Trouble falling or staying asleep
Older adults spend more time in lighter sleep and less in deep, restorative sleep. This means more nighttime waking and less “recharged” mornings.
2. Higher rates of sleep disorders
• Insomnia affects up to 40% of adults 55+
• Sleep apnea becomes more common and often goes undiagnosed
• Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) can interrupt falling asleep
3. Fragmented sleep
Sleep may be disrupted by:
• Pain (arthritis, back issues)
• Reflux
• Frequent nighttime urination
• Side effects of medications
4. Daytime sleepiness
Poor nighttime rest can lead to naps, fatigue, slowed reaction time, and an increased risk of falls.

Why Sleep Matters Even More Now
Good sleep is strongly linked to healthy aging. Poor sleep in older adults is associated with:
• Cognitive decline and increased dementia risk
• Weakened immune system
• Worsening of heart disease, diabetes, and depression
• Lower mood, motivation, and daily energy
Quality sleep isn’t a luxury—it’s essential.

Practical Tips to Improve Sleep After 55
✅ Keep a regular sleep schedule
Going to bed and waking up at consistent times strengthens your internal clock.
✅ Make your bedroom sleep-friendly
Keep it cool, dark, and quiet. Consider blackout curtains, a supportive mattress, or white noise.
✅ Create a calming wind-down routine
Gentle stretches, reading, soft music, or deep breathing prepare your body for rest.
✅ Watch caffeine, alcohol, and heavy evening meals
All can disrupt sleep cycles more as we age.
✅ Stay active during the day
Even light walking helps you sleep more deeply at night.
✅ Review medications with your doctor
Several common prescriptions affect sleep quality.
✅ Don’t ignore snoring or gasping at night
These are major signs of sleep apnea—very common after 55 and highly treatable.
✅ Consider a sleep study if symptoms persist
Home sleep tests make diagnosis simple and accessible.

Better Sleep = Better Health
Sleep may naturally change with age, but it doesn’t have to decline in quality. With the right strategies—and proper assessment when needed—older adults can enjoy deeper, more restorative sleep and feel more energized during the day.
A good night’s sleep truly is one of the most powerful tools for aging well, staying sharp, and living life to the fullest.

If you’d like, I can also prepare:
✅ a shorter “quick tips” version,
✅ an infographic-style version for FB, or
✅ a version specific to dental sleep medicine including bruxism, OSA, and oral appliance therapy.

11/04/2025

TO ALL DENTAL HYGIENISTS

Why I Love Sleep
As a healthcare provider, I see every day how profoundly good-quality sleep transforms people’s health, mood, and wellbeing. As a dentist, I’m privileged to contribute to the “Sleep Team” through my work in Dental Sleep Medicine. As a professional, I’m excited to be part of the evolving “Sleep Scene” and dream (excuse the pun) of helping it become an even more collaborative discipline through The Sleep Society. And as an individual, I know how much better I think, feel, and function when I sleep well, and how I feel when I don’t! I’m learning to enjoy sneaking in a little extra whenever I can too.
Dental Sleep Medicine came to our profession relatively late, so many clinicians still aren’t sure what to look for or what to do when they see it. Others hesitate because of uncertainty or misinformation. Yet when you start asking patients about their sleep, they’re often pleasantly surprised and deeply grateful.
The beauty of Dental Sleep Medicine is that it doesn’t require high-cost equipment or complex technology. What it does require is curiosity, observation, and an interest in the person behind the teeth - as the Canadian-born physician William Osler (1849–1919), said, “It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease, than what sort of disease a patient has.” That insight defines patient-centred care: understanding the whole person, not just their condition.
Accurate diagnosis and early recognition are key. While dentists and dental hygienists do not make medical sleep diagnoses, we can recognize the signs of sleep-disordered breathing and help guide our patients toward the right care. Remember - we don’t diagnose, but we can suspect OSA from the consistency of the signs and symptoms for which we’ve screened the patient. Think of the thousands of night guards made by dentists each year - and how many of those patients would benefit more from a custom sleep appliance that improves health, gratitude, and practice sustainability.
Dental hygienists, meanwhile, are at the frontline of health. You see your patients regularly and are ideally positioned to notice early signs of poor sleep and its effects on oral and systemic wellbeing. If you’re reading this, you’re part of the BCDHA or DHAA, and you already care deeply about your profession and your future scope of practice - all allied to your patients’ best health and interests.
We’re finally seeing courses become available for hygienists on the subjects of occlusion and TMD. As clinicians, dental hygienists can only be as good as their knowledge. Everything becomes easier, less tiring, and more enjoyable when you understand the workings of what you’re dealing with! It’s time to share Dental Sleep Medicine with the dental hygienist. When you know better, you do better.
I want to invite you as a dental hygienist (and your team), to join The Sleep Society - free of charge, to stay on the cutting edge of evolving College (BCCOHP and CDSA) standards for airway and sleep screening. You’ll help your patients, their families, and your practice prevent illness, fatigue, and even accidents before they happen. Sleep-aware hygienists strengthen their role in the dental team, expand their clinical relevance, and build bridges between dentistry and medicine. It’s an opportunity to grow, stay compliant, and rediscover how rewarding it feels to make a real difference - through better sleep and better health.
PLEASE DROP US A LINE IF INTERESTED
contactus@thesleepsociety.org

10/28/2025

Are your kids facing sleep problems? Here’s what you should know

As parents you’re attentive to every milestone in your children’s development.

As parents you’re attentive to every milestone in your children’s development. But sleep issues in children can be much tougher to discern than other markers of development because children’s sleep patterns and adaptation can vary widely and there is less of an accepted “norm.” Add to that, as children grow, they aren’t always forthcoming about not getting enough sleep or if they’re having sleep troubles. For young kids, they may not have the vocabulary to tell you they’re having trouble falling asleep, or they’re waking up in the night. Or, as the parent, you may be all too familiar with their issues because they are bouncing off the wall at night when you’re trying desperately to get them to sleep. Regardless, as the science becomes more prolific on sleep and kids, we are being awakened to the startling consequences of a lack of sleep in children across their stages of development.
Even one sleepless night can have a discernible impact on your child’s mood and performance.

It may not seem like a big deal if your child has a few bad sleeping nights here and there—in fact, it probably seems normal given all kids seem to struggle with sleep issues at some point, and occasional sleeplessness is an increasing problem in adults, as well. But the reality is, even one sleepless night can have a discernible impact on your child’s mood and performance. Here are some common next-day lack of sleep side effects:
Moodiness and Irritability:

Scientists have long understood the role of serotonin, a chemical in the brain, in regulating mood and emotional state. But it’s also clear that serotonin plays a key role in the sleep cycle. It is synthesized by the pineal gland to make melatonin, the hormone that tells the body when it’s morning vs night, and thus time to sleep. Stress and anxiety can result in lower serotonin levels, which in turn can be one of the causes of sleeplessness. Short term, this could manifest itself as outbursts or tantrums in your child; longer-term, it can cause issues with social adaptation and mental well-being.

Lack of Concentration:
Of particular concern for children in early school years where academic acclimation needs to be sponge-like due to the volume of and breadth of what they’re learning, sleeplessness can make it difficult for him or her to concentrate the next day. Sleep helps the brain “file and sort” information learned during the day, intuitively filing away information that isn’t needed imminently or repetitively and keeping that which is called on more frequently close at hand. Lack of sleep makes it harder for the brain to make those classifications and can result in poor (often unexplained at first) school performance.

Unexplained Sadness:
Insufficient sleep can cause difficulty in regulating emotion, due to the serotonin relationship noted above, in older kids and teenagers. And, older kids may be more reluctant to share their occasional sleeplessness—they may not want you to know they’re staying up late with their phone or trying to finish last-minute homework, or gaming. But left unaddressed, these types of sleep issues in children can result in lower-serotonin production.

Grogginess
After a bad night of sleep, kids may appear clumsier or slower than usual, and paired with a lack of energy, this can result in activities that are normally a fun and active release for them becoming frustrating and even scary.

It’s important to acknowledge, your child may not realize he or she isn’t getting enough sleep. This can be true even if they are chronically under sleeping; if they don’t know what a “normal” night’s sleep feels like, it’s hard to know they’re missing it. Look for these signs to determine if your child may be struggling with sleep.

Extreme difficulty getting out of bed in the morning
Oversleeping on weekends
Snapping, moodiness, and irritability
Unexplained increase in appetite and weight gain
Sudden changes in mood
Ways to Help With Kids Sleeping Problems
Teach great sleep hygiene
Stick to a consistent routine.
Remove bright screens (phones, tablets, video game consoles) from your kid’s bedroom

Create a great sleep environment—block out sunlight, heavy blankets, and keep temperature at or below about 68 degrees.
Avoid allowing your kid to oversleep on weekends in an effort to “catch-up” on lost sleep—irregular sleep patterns confuse the brain and make it difficult to manage the sleep cycle.

10/28/2025

Your Brain Doesn’t Wake Up All At Once 🧠☕

Ever feel like your body wakes up before your brain does?
Science says… you’re exactly right.

✅ When you wake up, your brain “boots up” in stages
✅ The front wakes first (thinking, decision-making)
✅ The back wakes later (vision + processing the world)

So that “half-asleep” feeling is a real thing.

🌙 Woke up from REM sleep?
That’s dream sleep.
Your brain jumps straight into fast activity…
…but YOU feel the groggiest. 😵‍💫

😌 Woke up from non-REM sleep?
You usually feel more clear and ready for the day.

Researchers found that the way your brain transitions into wakefulness affects how alert you feel — and it could help us better understand insomnia, restless awakenings, and why some mornings feel impossible.

Bottom line:
Your brain needs a few minutes to fully switch on.
Be kind to it while it catches up. ☕🧠✨

10/28/2025

Blood Oxygen for Apple Watch Returns—After Redesigning It to avoid Masimo Claims

After a prolonged legal battle with Masimo over pulse oximetry technology, Apple on Thursday announced it will introduce a redesigned blood oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update.

The blood oxygen feature was removed in 2023 after the United States International Trade Commission found that Apple violated US laws by incorporating Masimo’s patented light-based pulse oximetry technology in its products.

Users with these models in the United States who currently do not have the blood oxygen feature will have access to the redesigned feature by updating their paired iPhone to iOS 18.6.1 and their Apple Watch to watchOS 11.6.1. Following this update, sensor data from the blood oxygen app on Apple Watch will be measured and calculated on the paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Respiratory section of the Health app. This update was enabled by a recent US Customs ruling.

There will be no impact to Apple Watch units previously purchased that include the original blood oxygen feature, nor to Apple Watch units purchased outside of the United States.

Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 also offer users sleep apnea notifications, irregular rhythm notifications, the ECG app, fall detection, sleep tracking, wrist temperature sensing, the Vitals app, the Noise app, the Medications app, and the Mindfulness app, among many health tools.

Aug 18, 2025

10/28/2025

Who Apple Watch Is Really Alerting to Undiagnosed Sleep Apnea

Like many sleep medicine stakeholders, I felt the stirrings of something momentous when first Samsung, soon followed by Apple, received the OK from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market their over-the-counter devices that assess risk for sleep apnea in the United States. Hordes of the 23 million-plus people with undiagnosed moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) would effortlessly be alerted to their potential of harbouring the sleep disorder, I thought.

I have since tempered my expectations of what the risk detection features will mean for consumers who are unaware or in denial of OSA symptoms. That’s mostly because I learned neither of these smartwatch/health app combinations turns on the alert mechanism automatically.

The Samsung feature “is intended for on-demand use,” says Jeffrey Kim, a senior product manager at Samsung Electronics America. It monitors, on request, two nights of oxygen sensor data at a time. The accelerometer sensor-based Apple Watch feature runs opportunistically in the background, but only after the user sets up sleep tracking and passes checks for the FDA’s intended user criteria.

But I have high expectations for another group impacted by these consumer smartwatch sleep apnea risk alerts: sleep medicine-referring physicians.

The biggest impact will be on the doctors—from primary care physicians to cardiologists to gynecologists and more—who had been dismissing their patients’ sleep complaints, prescribing hypnotics without a full sleep evaluation, or referring patients to specialties like psychiatry for “depression”-related sleepiness.

Simultaneously, the alerts—and the evidence, like the exportable PDF Apple provides to users flagged for sleep apnea risk—will lend people the confidence to approach physicians about their sleep. And since the likelihood of a physician making a referral for OSA evaluation increased by a factor of nearly 10 when patients specifically inquired about OSA, at least according to one study’s findings,1 these alerts are poised to make a huge difference in OSA diagnosis.

OSA Screening: Benefits Versus Harms
The smartwatch features appear to work as well as (and possibly even better than) existing screeners like the Epworth Sleepiness Scale. Samsung’s sensitivity is 82.7% and modified specificity is 91.1%; Apple’s sensitivity is 66.3% and specificity is 98.5%. Both were designed with low-ish sensitivities to minimize false positives. Both were tested on large numbers of people across the spectrum of sleep apnea severities, including those with normal breathing. Caveat: This is based on their FDA submissions, not on peer-reviewed studies.

But, curiously, with these FDA nods, the country has effectively opted in to a grand screening experiment without knowing if flagging people at scale will have benefits that outweigh harms.

The US Preventive Services Task Force has researched the potential of OSA screening on asymptomatic adults numerous times, most recently in 2022, and come up empty-handed.2 According to the task force, zero studies have been published on the harms of screening the general population for OSA or on the financial costs of the OSA diagnostic pathway, and only a few have detailed the potential physical harms of OSA therapy.

For its part, Samsung, in its De Novo documents, details risks ranging from false positives and false negatives to misinterpretation of device output to electrical shocks. It also lists the methods—like specific testing and labeling—in place to mitigate the risks.

I don’t fault technology companies for pressing forward with features that make their smartwatches more appealing, but I do worry about unintended consequences.

“In the patients who get a positive screen, I think that that is a beneficial thing for them,” says Steven Holfinger, MD, MS, vice chair for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)’s emerging technologies committee. “I also think it’s yet to be seen if the net effect is truly positive—because there are a lot of things that could potentially go wrong. For example, we don’t know how many patients who get a negative screen are not going to seek care when otherwise they should.”

Also, it’s not exactly the general population that wears smartwatches. It’s skewed toward Hispanic, Gen-Z, college-educated women with full-time employment.3

“If you’re viewing a strategy of population screening through the lens of ‘we’re going to allow this to kind of naturally happen this way where patients screen themselves—but only the patients who can afford it can do so,’ then that’s not really the optimal strategy to screen a population, I would imagine,” Holfinger says.

May 5, 2025 By Sree Roy

08/30/2025

https://deep-into-sleep.captivate.fm/episode/ep112-dental-sleep-medicine-how-your-dentist-can-help-you-deal-with-your-sleep-problems-with-dr-bray?fbclid=IwY2xjawJBgslleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHfL9gDzUN1oyxJGnOzgtIqnyFmtuaRssgE03xUO6pR6O_Cl2crlZ7yH6Hg_aem_7dFSUfd72yKcrORx_2RYsg

For this week’s episode, I am so honored to have on the show, Dr. Stephen Bray. He has worked in the field of dentistry for 20 years in the UK, US, and Canada. In this interview, he will share with us how a dentist can help you in detecting whether you are suffering from a sleep disorder like...

08/29/2025

Cranio
1995 Oct;13(4):227-37. doi: 10.1080/08869634.1995.11678073.
Recapture of temporomandibular joint disks using anterior repositioning appliances: an MRI study
H C Simmons 3rd 1, S J Gibbs
ABSTRACT
Thirty consecutive patients seeking treatment for painful temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disease were enrolled in a prospective study to assess the relationship between the recapture of displaced disks by anterior repositioning appliances (ARA) and the relief of symptoms. After standard clinical workup including assessment of pain, maxillary and mandibular ARAs were constructed that repositioned condyles to the Gelb 4/7 position. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was performed before and immediately after the insertion of ARAs. Initial MRI findings showed 26 joints with reducing disk displacements in 17 patients, seven partially-reducing joints in four patients, 14 nonreducing joints in 11 patients, and 13 normal joints in eight patients. Postinsertion MRI showed recapture of disks in 25 of 26 reducing displacements (96%), but no recapture in partially-reducing or nonreducing joints. All but one of the normal joints remained unchanged. Pain assessment showed significant relief of symptoms in all three categories. The degree of pain relief was significantly greater in recaptured reducing disks than the other categories (p < 0.05). ARA therapy provides effective pain relief regardless of disk status, although a greater degree of relief may be achieved in recaptured reducing internal derangements.

08/29/2025

https://youtu.be/jAvGP4fFb2Q?si=gNnDae1ajYY_mHUm

D J began with a Diagnostic Neuromuscular Orthotic and is now utilizing DNA Appliance.A long but a Great experience.My pain is not completely gone but I hav...