Interest in dental sleep medicine is increasing, and some dental students and educators are looking to keep up with the trend.
The number of graduates for dental assistants and laboratory tech dropped from 2017 to 2021. Dental hygiene graduates saw only a small amount of growth, 0.4 percent, in the same period.
With the industry already experiencing recruiting challenges and staffing issues, the lack of graduates is concerning.
However, there is one speciality that is gaining interest: dental sleep medicine. Mitchell Levine, DMD, president-elect of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, spoke with Becker's on July 6 to discuss the growing interest in implementing dental sleep medicine in education.
Editor's note: Responses were edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Question: Has there been an increased interest in implementing dental sleep medicine studies into dental school lately?
Dr. Mitchell Levine: There's an increased interest at different levels. I think there's an increased level of interest at the educator level where faculty would like to introduce [dental sleep education] to their students. There's an increased level of interest at the student level about learning more about this. The split is getting the interest level to rise above administrators and people who make decisions on curriculum within the dental schools.
Right now, for general dental studies, the students who are in dental school getting their DDS or their DMD in those four years of dental school, there are no requirements by the Commission on Dental Accreditation for sleep education. Whether it's sleep disorders or sleep apnea, whatever it is. Right now, the interest is not so urgent on the administration side because there are no requirements for it.
Q: When and how did this trend start?
ML: Probably within the last three to five years. It's picked up some. I think it was honestly really at a grassroots level. Some of this originated from academies, particularly one of those being the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine. The history goes on longer than the last three to five years, but I think that the main interest has picked up through academies and other podcasts and webinars where people become more interested in sleep as a whole. It's evolved over these last three to five years to more than the recognition that sleep is important to overall health but then beginning to look at individual aspects of sleep, including sleep disorders. In which case, there was the thinking that certain sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea in particular, having a capacity in which the dentist can play a larger role as compared to other sleep disorders.
It's become very much a grassroots interest and it continues to evolve. If you look at the number of courses online that are available or by webinar, they've increased exponentially in these last three to five years with the exception of COVID kind of getting in the way. I think that's the only thing that's probably suppressed interest, but now that we're moving beyond the COVID realm and figuring out how to live with it on a day-to-day basis, we're beginning to see that interest swell again.