RPTF

Oral myofunctional therapy as a treatment option for obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea: literature review

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Ana Cláudia Lopes

 

ABSTRACT

Purposes: Explain the current information on the characterization, symptomatology, epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment options for obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea. Present in more detail the oral myofunctional therapy as a treatment option for speech and language therapists to apply inserted in a multidisciplinary team. Methodology: The literature review was conducted on PubMed data and b-on , filtered through articles written in English or Portuguese , like “Case Reports”, “Clinical Trial”, “Controlled Clinical Trial”, “Meta-Analysis” and “Randomized Controlled Trial”, with full text available, limited to Human and with 20 years of publication. The selection took place in three stages of analysis (reading the title, reading the abstracts and reading the entire content of the articles). Results: Five articles were detected with the oldest being published 15 years ago, the most recent a year ago and 40% are case studies. Oral myofunctional therapy was applied to 128 men and 15 women with obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea from mild to severe, in a variable period from three months up to a maximum of six months. The results point to the overall reduction of signs and symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea. Conclusions: There is clinical evidence of the effectiveness of oral therapy in myofunctional resolution of obstructive sleep apnea and hypopneabeing appropriate to conduct controlled, randomized studies that achieve high levels of scientific evidence of its application in this pathology. 

 

KEYWORDS: Obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea (OSAH); Oral myofunctional therapy; Speech and language therapist