Dental sleep medicine: A further introduction to an emerging dental discipline

Dental sleep medicine is a discipline traditionally focusing on sleep-breathing disorders like snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. In everyday clinical practice, however, such disorders rarely occur in isolation. Rather, they frequently co-occur with other sleep disorders linked to dentistry, such as orofacial pain, dry mouth, hypersalivation, gastroesophageal reflux, and sleep bruxism. Therefore, a new definition has been formulated in which dental sleep medicine has been described to include the diagnostic and treatment aspects of all dental sleep disorders. In this article, the reasons why this development was initiated and the current status of dental sleep medicine as a broader discipline are described, along with a brief description of the various dental sleep disorders.