We at Premiere Sleep Associates are proud to share that our colleagues at Zephyr Sleep Technologies Inc. have been approved by the FDA to sell their new medical device in the United States. The MATRx Plus™ is “the first ever ‘at-home’ class II medical device to identify obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients suitable for oral appliance therapy.” (Link to press release.) Zephyr has partnered with Dentsply Sirona, the world’s largest manufacturer of professional dental products and technologies, to bring MATRx plus™ to the United States market.
What does this mean for you, someone who might have mild to moderate obstructive sleep apnea?
The availability of the new MATRx Plus™ means that via your sleep center, sleep physician’s office or sleep medicine dentistry office, you’ll have access to an easy, intuitive at-home device you can use to administer an apnea sleep test from the comfort of your own home.
The MATRx Plus™ has been developed specifically to facilitate the diagnosis and treatment of people with milder forms of undiagnosed OSA–cases that can be treated by wearing an oral appliance to keep the airway open during sleep, rather than using a CPAP or other form of PAP machine.
If you haven’t had a sleep apnea diagnosis yet but you have symptoms of apnea, such as snoring and excessive daytime sleepiness, you may have undiagnosed OSA. An estimated one in four adults in the U.S. have apnea, and over 85% of these cases are thought to be undiagnosed.
If your physician and dentist think you may have mild to moderate OSA, ask about the possibility of using MATRx Plus™ to conduct a sleep test to confirm a diagnosis.
The MATRx Plus™ and its predecessor, the MATRx™, allow patients to self-test for apnea at home without having to travel to a sleep center to undergo an overnight sleep study. The device has additional features that make it ideal for patients to use at home:
For sleep medicine dentists and physicians, the MATRx Plus™ reduces some of the uncertainty when determining whether or not a patient will respond well to oral appliance therapy for sleep apnea.
Using proprietary algorithms and machine learning, this new device informs medical professionals of two things for each patient:
Improving diagnosis and treatment in this manner is better for the patient and improves efficiency of care.
The MATRx plus™ will be available for purchase by sleep medicine dentistry practices like ours, and also by sleep labs and sleep clinics. (The previous version of this device, the FDA-approved MATRx™, is currently being used in more than 200 sleep labs and clinics in the United States.)
We at Premiere Sleep Associates are proud to share that we have been a part of the clinical study for this new and exciting diagnostic product since October 2016. Our practice was the first dental office to have use of these units while going through the FDA, at a time when only a handful of sleep medicine dentists across the nation had access to them.
MATRx Plus™ is just now available to other dentists–but we’ve been using the MATRx™ to help apnea patients for two years. To date, we have completed over 70 studies using the MATRx Plus™.
If you have any questions about this new technology, we encourage you to call our office to learn more.