ADA Children’s Airway Education Event
The ADA’s new SRBD Policy Statement includes an excellent point about dentist’s responsibility:
In children, screening through history and clinical examination may identify signs and symptoms of deficient growth and development, or other risk factors that may lead to airway issues. If risk for SRBD is determined, intervention through medical/dental referral or evidenced based treatment may be appropriate to help treat the SRBD and/or develop an optimal physiologic airway and breathing pattern.
Don’t you want to know what to do? How to make this reality for your patient families? This conference is for you. Registration information is at: www.ada.org/CELive
Drs. David Gozal, Christian Guilleminault, Kevin Boyd, Barry Raphael, and many others have signed on to help and are enthusiastic to bring the many subsets of medicine and dentistry together on this. Children deserve our maximum effort – and our physician colleagues agree. They are traveling to this first-of-its kind conference at ADA headquarters to be part of the solution.
No part of medicine/dentistry can do this alone. Sleep physicians have no clinical role in growth and development, orthodontists don’t diagnose SRBD, families require special behavioral skills, and general dentists need to know which specialists they can refer their at-risk children to.
General dentists, as a whole, see more children more frequently than any other subset of medicine and dentistry for preventive services. Talking with families about SRBD opens the door to lifetime health.
The treatment window for affecting the growth of the airway is short, with 90% complete before the child reaches puberty. Identifying at-risk children early enough to intervene and set them on a path of lifetime health is going to be dentistry’s greatest contribution to community health ever.
This may be the first of many such conferences – and this one is selling out fast. If you want to be there at the first one, to build your learning from the ground up, go to www.ada.org/CELive and sign up today.