Two New Tongue Technologies To Watch For

January 10, 2011

If you remember from high school biology class, the tongue has a great amount of sensory and motor nerve innervation with a disproportionately large part of the brain that’s dedicated to taste, sensation, and movement. Along these lines, I found two interesting up and coming companies that uses the the tongue to treat two major conditions: obstructive sleep apnea and blindness.

The first company, Linguaflex, is developing a minimally invasive tongue implant procedure that can be performed in the office. They don’t give out very much more information, but when I searched for the company on Google Patent, here’s what I found: It seems to be a partially implantable anchor that’s placed underneath the tongue which grabs the genioglossus muscle. The part that hangs out in the mouth is loosened during the day and anchored to the teeth or a dental appliance at night while sleeping. The Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ira Sanders, was instrumental in mapping out the neuroanatomy of the larynx during his tenure at Mt. Sinai, and is now working on tongue neuroanatomy and sleep apnea research at Linguaflex.

The other company doesn’t have anything to do with sleep apnea, but it’s such a cool concept for blindness that I thought it was worth mentioning. Their device is a sensor array (like a lollipop) that’s placed on the tongue which provides tactile feedback through a video signal that’s converted into gentle electric pulses on the tongue. You have to watch the video on their website to see what I mean.

What do you think about these new technologies?

Written by Steven Park · Filed Under Blog | 1 Comment

Sleep Apnea And Blindness?

August 17, 2009

My father just turned 77, and he’s living the life of his dreams. Ever since retirement, he’s been taking courses with undergrads at Hunter college, hikes in the mountains, plays tennis, swims, performs in plays and musicals, sings in his church choir, and goes to see the opera and symphony concerts routinely. He recently relayed to me how grateful he is, as many of his friends are either dead or incapacitated with chronic illnesses. I guess it’s only natural to reflect on these issues, in light of what’s happening to our peers.

I recently came across a patient in his 60s, who was recently diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea. He stopped breathing over 100 times per hour. Fortunately, he was able to use and significantly benefit from his CPAP machine. He’s not feeling perfect, but his quality of life is greatly improved, and he continues to use his CPAP regularly.

On his last visit, he happened to mention that two of his close friends have obstructive sleep apnea but refuses to use CPAP. Both their machines are sitting in their closets. They’re both overweight and have a variety of medical problems. One recently suffered a stroke that left him half blind, and another one had a massive pulmonary embolus and had to be hospitalized for a week. These experiences with with friends only reinforces his daily CPAP regimen and to take every measure possible to improve his health.

Since having untreated obstructive sleep apnea can significantly increase your risk for clots and stroke, it’s pretty likely that his two friends could have avoided their recent medical complications if they had figured out a way to either use CPAP regularly or treated their sleep apnea in other ways.

Although the overall statistic of men who have even mild obstructive sleep apnea is about 25%, if you take only people 60 or over, it’s probably much higher. In addition, that 25% statistic was reported from a study over 20 years ago. Now that people are much heavier, that overall statistic is likely to be higher. Knowing that over 90% of people with sleep apnea are not diagnosed, it’s not surprising that so many relatively young people have are having unexplained heart attacks and strokes.

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