Background: Many patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are mouth-breathers. Mouth-breathing not only narrows the upper airway, consequently worsening the severity of OSA, but also it affects compliance with nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment.
Sleep Disordered Breathing (SDB) is a new term that includes open-mouth breathing and sleep apnea. Both conditions affect the growth and proportions of your child's face and general health.
Common causes of mouth breathing include: Nasal blockages causes by cold, flu or allergies. Deviated septum or the cartilage divider between the nostrils is abnormal making it difficult to breath through the nose.
Causes of Mouth-Breathing
There are two primary reasons for mouth-breathing during sleep. The first is that there may be an issue with or blockage in your nasal airway, such as a deviated septum and congestion. The second is simply due to bad habits.
If you breathe through your mouth and breathe hard, there's less oxygen delivery to the cells.” This makes us more prone to high blood pressure, anxiety, stress, depression, sleep-disordered breathing, asthma and fatigue.
Mouth breathing is surprisingly more common than you think. In a Sleep Review study, 61% of adults surveyed identified themselves as a mouth breather. That's an awful lot of adults struggling to get a breath through their nose.
If you find yourself breathing through your mouth, close your mouth and try to consciously breathe through your nose. Elevate your head during sleep. Before you go to sleep, put an extra pillow below your head. Raising the height of your head while you sleep may help keep your mouth from opening.
What causes nasal obstruction at night? Throughout the day, gravity is helping your body drain the mucus out of your nasal cavities. So, when you lay down in bed at night, it's harder for your mucus to drain properly and it accumulates. This leads to nasal congestion and that “blocked nose” feeling.
It depends on how severe your mouth breathing is, but most of the time you can still reverse its effects, especially when it's detected and corrected early, before the worst side effects have kicked in.
According to the survey data, 71% of beds across America are host to a mouth breather. The most common signs of mouth breathing reported were being awoken by nighttime nasal congestion (75%) waking up with a dry mouth (61%), and snoring (37%).
There are three types of sleep-disordered breathing: Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA), Central Sleep Apnoea (CSA) and mixed or complex sleep apnoea. Each type has distinctive characteristics that enable diagnosis.
Long term mouth breathing can lead to a myriad of oral issues including crowded teeth, cracked lips, caries (or cavities), gum disease and more. But the issues don't stop at the mouth. Mouth breathers are also more likely to experience digestive issues, chronic fatigue, morning headaches and sore throat.
By themselves, nasal or nasal pillow masks aren't a good idea for mouth breathers, because you can lose air pressure as you exhale. That said, if your mouth breathing is only out of habit you can safely use these types of CPAP masks with the simple addition of a chin strap!
Breathing through your mouth at night puts you at higher risk for sleep disorders including snoring, sleep apnea and hypopnea, the partial blockage of air, scientists have found. Each of those, in turn, can lead to daytime fatigue.
People who breathe through their mouth and not their nose are more likely to develop sleep disorders, including sleep apnea. Children who have mouth breathing are more likely to have dental problems like malocclusion and facial differences.
“More than half of the people diagnosed with ADHD are mouth breathers. That is too significant a statistic to be a coincidence.” Understanding the connecting between mouth breathing and ADHD can help your child get the treatment they need.
Literature also shows that children with breathing problems like snoring, mouth breathing, or apnea are 40–100 times more likely to develop behavioral problems resembling ADHD.
As an adult, the growth and development has already happened but it's not too late–there are MANY health benefits to breathing through your nose instead of your mouth at any age!
It can impact energy levels and concentration and can even cause bad breath. Research shows that when we breathe through our mouths, there is an increase in oxygen in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This part of the brain affects personality expression, decision making and social behaviour.
Chronic mouth-breathing can also lead to impaired brain functioning as well as impaired mental development in children. As stated earlier, chronic mouth-breathing leads to more adrenalin being released at night, which interferes with sleep quality.
It can lead to a variety of health issues and drastically reduce life expectancy if not managed properly. Studies show that patients who develop sleep apnea before the age of fifty have a life expectancy between 8 and 18 years.