Cephalographic airway tracings

I thought some of you might find these cephalometric radiographs (x-ray) tracings interesting that Dr. Prinsell made of my airway earlier this week.

A typical airway of 11mm (not mine)


My narrow 2mm airway (highlighted in yellow)


Blockage of my airway when doing a modified Muller maneuver to simulate an apnea.


Predicted results of a 13mm chin advancement (AIMO)

Fascinating

Thanks for posting

cheers

Mars

I gather the radiographs are taken with the patient supine.

jdm2857 wrote:I gather the radiographs are taken with the patient supine.

Nope, the images where taken standing up.

Egads!

Are you planning to have the chin advancement?

always_tired wrote:Are you planning to have the chin advancement?

I'm seriously considering it. Either alone or combined with an MMA. My problem is trying to get the Canadian health care system to do it. For those of you that have been on here a long time know that I have been struggling for 3 years. I have a doctor in Halifax that is willing to do a 5mm MMA & GA but all the doctors that I have seen in the US don't believe that that will be enough advancement to help.

Thankfully I'm doing much better than I was even 6 months ago. The second nasal surgery helped a lot. Getting off CPAP and (hopefully) stopping the centrals seems to have helped too. I'm currently using a Klearway dental device. I've just started monitoring my sleep regularly with a Zeo.

Egads indeed. 2 mms is literaly narrower than my drinking straws!

I must have missed when you stopped CPAP entirely, James. I'm glad you're so much better.

O.

Hi James,

Interesting simulation information of airway passage.
tongue mass reduction might be a clear choice comparitively to massive MMA surgery?
Take car and hope all well.

Mckooi

James, is there any way you can view and save your nightly data to refer back to other than at their myZero website?? Does it bother or concern you at all that while unlimited access for downloading to and use of myZeo.com website is free now sometime in the future there may be a fee instituted to do so?

Slinky wrote:James, is there any way you can view and save your nightly data to refer back to other than at their myZero website??

Currently there is no built in way. I have been doing a Alt-PrnScr and saving the screenshots as images.

Slinky wrote:Does it bother or concern you at all that while unlimited access for downloading to and use of myZeo.com website is free now sometime in the future there may be a fee instituted to do so?

I would be very unhappy if they did so. Given the price of the device I think it would be a mistake for them to do so. Is there some indication that they will?

What is your opinion of the Zeo?

I had read the following recently on CNET:

by DPinDC August 3, 2009 6:54 PM PDT
I BOUGHT ONE . . . based on 1) softball newspaper reviews (and CNET certainly hasn?t brought any insights to it) -- clearly engineered by the company with the same provided photos, video clips and story-lines appearing in article after article . . . and 2) my silly thinking that there could be a "silver bullet."

MONITORING IS NOT AS PRECISE as one might infer. You can wake up constantly through the night, but if those events are less than a few minutes each, Zeo doesn't notice, e.g., I get brilliant sleep scores after such extremely disruptive nights.

SLEEP-SCORING ALGORITHM IS LAME, e.g., one night I couldn't sleep, got up for 3.5 hours (which was accurately recorded in the device because I kept the monitor on), ended up getting up about 10 a.m. (it was Saturday), and the Zeo gave me an above-average score for a terrible night's sleep (seemingly because I netted 7 hours albeit over 10.5 hours time)!

SO WHAT IS IT ? A TOY? The company pointed says the Zeo is ?not a medical device or intended for diagnosis or treatment of sleep disorders.? So why is all the product talk about producing better sleep for people?

PRICE. Geez, you can buy a real computer for $400. Just read some good articles about sleep. As NYT's David Pogue concludes: having spent $400, you might be more motivated to use good sleep practices, but you could have done that without parting with four Benjies.

BOTTOM-LINE: Zeo is not wowee technology. At best, its stunning price motivates you to get more serious about your pre-sleep habits.

And in the positive:

by sirhutchylax August 27, 2009 5:15 PM PDT
You're talking about SLEEP! Its 1/3rd of your life, why not make the investment to better understand your body to significantly improve the other 2/3rds....its the most crucial preparation for any athlete before an event, any student before a test, and can change an average persons daily life immensely.
I agree its a little over priced but why not invest in your own health and well-being? It has made a huge impact on my life and helped me address sleeping problems i have been facing since i was a kid. Sleep is one of the fastest growing problems and markets in the country right now, price or not ill be surprised if this thing dosent become wildly popular in the next few years.

You can use it to produce more efficient sleep, how is the fact that it dosent diagnose sleep disorders at all relevant? All it takes to be diagnosed with insomnia is to walk into any doctors office and say "it takes me hours to fall asleep" something the zeo can tell you with far more accuracy and data to prove it.
Just because it dosent have its own PHD and dosent want to deal with legal issues dosent mean it cant significantly improve your sleep.

And finally:

by JeyRo July 17, 2009 1:39 AM PDT
I use http://www.Easywakeup.net app for my iPhone that does the same job, saves money all right

5aces wrote:What is your opinion of the Zeo?

So far I am pretty happy with it. I did my research before buying it so I knew what to expect. As far as I know its the only affordable device on the market that can monitor sleep stages.

5aces wrote:MONITORING IS NOT AS PRECISE as one might infer. You can wake up constantly through the night, but if those events are less than a few minutes each, Zeo doesn't notice, e.g., I get brilliant sleep scores after such extremely disruptive nights.

My understanding after talking to Zeo is that awakenings must be 2 minutes or greater to be scored. The rational for this was that they only wanted to tell users about awakenings that they would remember. It typically takes 3 or more minutes for a person to remember an awakening. If the Zeo scored all awakenings the average consumer would come to the conclusion that the device was not working correctly.

Of course as a person with sleep apnea I want to know about every awakening, no matter how brief. However I understand there rational for their design decision. I do wish there was a way to switch it into a mode where it scored all awakenings for those of us that care about that.

5aces wrote:SLEEP-SCORING ALGORITHM IS LAME, e.g., one night I couldn't sleep, got up for 3.5 hours (which was accurately recorded in the device because I kept the monitor on), ended up getting up about 10 a.m. (it was Saturday), and the Zeo gave me an above-average score for a terrible night's sleep (seemingly because I netted 7 hours albeit over 10.5 hours time)!

I have noticed this myself. Basically the Zeo ignores sleep efficiency (total time in bed divided by total sleep time) They only seem to count from first time to sleep until last awakening. Hopefully they will change this in the future.

5aces wrote:SO WHAT IS IT ? A TOY? The company pointed says the Zeo is ?not a medical device or intended for diagnosis or treatment of sleep disorders.? So why is all the product talk about producing better sleep for people?

Its a way of better monitoring your sleep. A big part of there product seems to the the sleep coaching and showing you what you are doing that is affecting your sleep. The first step of fixing anything that is broken is measuring it. The Zeo does a decent job of that for people _without_ sleep disorders.

5aces wrote:PRICE. Geez, you can buy a real computer for $400.

The next closest device to this is the Watch-PAT. Price $6,000. Its a lot cheaper than that...

5aces wrote:All it takes to be diagnosed with insomnia is to walk into any doctors office and say "it takes me hours to fall asleep" something the zeo can tell you with far more accuracy and data to prove it.

This is one of the values of the Zeo. I get the feeling that doctors often ignore patients reports of sleep problems. They have no way of objectively knowing how bad the problem is. With a Zeo you can show them exactly

PS One of my favorite features of the Zeo is SmartWake. It will try to wake you up in light stages of sleep within a given time window. Very nice.

I've had mine for about a little over a week and I'm pretty happy with it as well. Just like with everything else, there is no magic bullett. But if you are interested in getting an incremental understanding of your sleep patterns then this definitely aids the exercise. The SmartWake feature is by far the best part and I believe it was the original impetus for creating the device in the first place.

I have this device, a pulse-oximeter, a smartcard/reader/software for your CPAP and a video camera which I use in combination on occasion to gain a greater understanding of the patterns of my sleep disorder.