Rahma Mungia
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Two questions sit behind this work: how is a common sleep disorder actually treated in everyday dental offices, and why do some people skip dental care altogether? Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), in which the airway repeatedly collapses during sleep, is often treated by dentists with a custom mouthguard-like device.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
obstructive sleep apnea
oral appliance therapy
mandibular advancement device
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Describe how community dentists in the South Texas Oral Health Network adjust oral appliance therapy for obstructive sleep apnea, documenting their protocols at delivery, initial and final adjustment visits for 60 patients.
- Measure sleep apnea outcomes and device use in patients wearing mandibular advancement devices, using three-night NightOwl home sleep apnea tests and compliance data from embedded DentiTrac chips.
- Determine how personal violent victimization relates to dental care use from adolescence to adulthood (ages 12–44), using the nationally representative Add Health longitudinal study and comparing across race/ethnicity and income.
- Test how indirect exposure to community violence affects dental care use from ages 5 to 22, using the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study.
- Relate fatal and nonfatal shootings to dental care use rates across 15,882 urban census tracts, using the Neighborhood Gun Violence and Health in 100 Cities dataset.
More about the research
Yet there is little agreement on how practitioners should adjust these devices or how well patients do. Separately, nearly 2 in 5 American adults had no dental visit in the past year, and violence in people's lives and neighborhoods may be one reason. Both projects study oral health care as it happens in the real world, one through community dental practices and one through large national datasets.
Why it matters
Many people with obstructive sleep apnea rely on dental oral appliances. Clearer evidence on how dentists adjust these devices could improve treatment success, patient satisfaction and quality of life. Linking violence exposure to missed dental care could help design violence-reduction interventions within dental settings. This may especially help communities affected by firearm violence and groups facing racial or economic disparities in oral health.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Devin L Brown
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine which obstructive sleep apnea endotypes, such as airway collapsibility, loop gain and arousal threshold, drive sleep apnea after stroke, and how they differ by ethnicity and from stroke-free participants, using polysomnography in the BASIC study.
Erin Kirkham
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Compare mean drug-induced sleep endoscopy (DISE) airway obstruction scores in children randomized to sedation with propofol versus dexmedetomidine, testing whether propofol exaggerates airway collapse.
Colter Mitchell
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compare short-term health, economic, social and behavioral outcomes among essential workers, non-essential workers, and people who lost jobs during the 2020 pandemic, using Fragile Families cohort parents and young adults.
The school
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio: 15 labs on PI Pages, $313M a year on research, 149 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
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