Sleep medicine in japanese pre-doctoral dental curriculum

Abstract

In the sleep medicine field, dentists are increasingly required to provide important services such as oral appliance manufacture, orthodontic approach or maxillofacial surgery for sleep disordered breathing. For the dentist, sleep bruxism is one of the important factors for oral health. However there is limited information regarding sleep medicine in pre-doctoral dental education. The aim of this survey is to reveal how sleep medicine related education has been done in Japanese dental school. This was an e-mail based questionnaire survey. A three-page cover letter with 10 questions was sent out to all the 29 Japanese dental schools. The main categories included: the number of hours taught in each of the 6 years, educational style such as didactic or clinical experience, which departments taught the materials, which diagnoses and therapies were reviewed, and what additional topics if any were discussed. Which department is responsible for sleep apnea patients in clinical setting was also asked. Twenty-six out of 29 dental schools (89.7%) responded to this survey. Of the responding dental schools, 80.8% reported some educational time in sleep medicine. Five schools (23.8%) reported no curriculum time. The average number of educational hours was 3.8 h. The majority were taught by didactic (58.5%). The most frequently covered topics included sleep-related breathing disorders (20 schools, 95.2%) and sleep bruxism (13 schools, 61.9%). More than half of dental school taught oral appliance, CPAP, ENT surgical therapy, oral surgery as treatment option for sleep apnea, but orthodontic approaches was only reviewed at 38.1% of dental schools. Educational time for sleep medicine in Japanese pre-doctoral education is similar with that of US (3.92 h, Simmons, 2012). While sleep medicine in Japanese pre-doctoral dental education is similar to the previous US report, it is still required to expand this topic in Japan for collaborating as members of a multidisciplinary sleep medicine approaches. This study is supported by Japanese association of the general dentistry.