Now that life expectancy is said to be 100 years, how to extend healthy life expectancy and improve quality of life （QOL） is an important issue. Needless to say, the acquisition of healthy oral functions plays a part in this, because these functions include breathing for us to live healthily, and chewing power and swallowing power to maintain the quality of eating habits. This is closely related to articulation and sensory integration in conversation, which is one means of communication. Many of the oral function-related problems that become conspicuous from early childhood, such as mouth breathing, sleep-related breathing disorders （SRBD）, abnormal swallowing habits, malocclusion, and dysphonia, can be traced back to sucking movements in infancy. It is thought that this occurs because infantile-type swallowing cannot transition to adult-type swallowing and persists. This is because children learn adult-style swallowing, predation with the lips, bolus formation with the tongue, and chewing with the teeth during the period of baby food and infant food. However, inappropriate introduction of baby food and infant food is thought to impede learning of these oral functions and adversely affect development. Therefore, dentists need to intervene more actively so that this important learning period is not just a time for eating.
Furthermore, when promoting baby food, we must not forget to comprehensively examine not only the development of the oral functions, but also the physical and mental development of the child and the developmental state of sensory integration. It is thus important for people in all professions related to children to have the same awareness and be actively involved.
Accordingly, this paper discusses the importance of baby food and infant food for oral function development and how to deal with it.

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Objective: Obstructive sleep apnea （OSA） has a high prevalence among sleep-related respiratory disorders, and the main symptoms are snoring, apnea, daytime sleepiness, and lack of deep sleep. As a treatment method, an oral appliance （OA） has been established as a treatment for OSA according to clinical guidelines. Although the severity of OSA tends to be evaluated by the apnea-hypopnea index （AHI）, it is necessary to evaluate OSA not only based on the AHI value but also based on the clinical features. Therefore, it is important to evaluate OSA from multiple perspectives. We attempted cluster analysis to clarify the clinical features of OSA patients.
Methods: The subjects were 381 patients who visited the Center of Dental Sleep Medicine between June 2017 and June 2020. From the medical records, we extracted the values of age, BMI, presence/absence of hypertension, AHI, lowest percutaneous arterial oxygen saturation （Lowest SpO₂）, and subjective evaluation of sleepiness （ESS）. Patients were classified using cluster analysis.
Results: As a result of cluster analysis, OSA patients were classified into four clusters according to the characteristics of the clinical features. Cluster 1 had few subjective symptoms of sleepiness, Cluster 2 had a high comorbidity rate of hypertension, Cluster 3 had sleepiness, and Cluster 4 had high AHI, low value of Lowest SpO₂, and strong sleepiness. It was clarified that there are various clinical features of OSA as well as the clinical features of typical severe OSA cases, such as Cluster 4.
Conclusions: It is suggested that a multifaceted evaluation is needed, not just the AHI value. It is also important to set treatment goals that should be emphasized for each characteristic of the cluster.

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Objective : An oral appliance （OA） can alleviate upper airway obstruction by pulling the mandible forward during sleep. While a large mandibular advancement with an OA decreases the number of apnea and hypopnea events, long-term use may cause side effects such as toothache, and stiffness and pain in the temporomandibular joint.
This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of different mandibular positions for obstructive sleep apnea （OSA） and determine the optimal therapeutic mandibular position.
Methods : Thirty-two patients （17 males, 15 females） with mild to moderate OSA participated in this prospective study. All patients were randomly allocated to receive a 50％ mandibular advancement or a 75％ mandibular advancement with an OA. The pre- and post-treatment apnea-hypopnea index （AHI）, apnea index （AI）, and Epworth Sleepiness Scale （ESS） were compared. Treatment effectiveness and treatment success were compared between groups.
Results : AHI improved significantly in both groups, and AI improved significantly in the group with 50％ mandibular advancement. No significant improvements in the ESS were observed in either group. There was no significant difference in treatment effectiveness between groups. Regarding the proportion of females and males whose treatment was effective in the two groups, there were significantly more females than males.
Conclusions : For patients with mild to moderate OSA, 50％ mandibular advancement is recommended as the initial therapeutic mandibular position. It is suggested that gender differences also affect treatment effectiveness.

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