Mouth breathing when asleep increases risk of tooth damage
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- Published: Wednesday, 17 February 2016 07:27
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New research has found that at stages during the night, acidity levels in the mouths of individuals who breathed through their mouths fell well below the threshold when tooth enamel begins to break down. Lead author Joanne Choi said: “"This study is the first to continuously monitor intraoral pH changes in healthy individuals over several days. Our findings support the idea that mouth breathing may indeed be a causal factor for dental diseases such as enamel erosion and caries.”
The research from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, was published in the Journal of Oral Rehabilitation. The researchers noted that dentists are reporting an increasing number of patients who complain of dry mouth, especially during sleep or upon awakening. Previous studies suggest that dry-mouth individuals run a higher risk of erosion than individuals with normal salivary secretion rates.
For the new study, the researchers decided to investigate what happens to acidity levels in the mouth during open- and closed-mouth sleep. They measured pH and temperature levels in the mouths of 10 healthy volunteers as they alternately slept without and with a nose clip that forced them to breathe through the mouth.
The volunteers were fitted with a device that continuously measured the pH and temperature of the palatal aspect of the upper central incisors. They wore it for two sets of 48 hours. To force them to breathe through their mouths as they slept, the volunteers wore the nose clip for two nights of the four. To balance any potential bias from the wearing sequence, five of them wore the clip the first night and the others wore it the second night at each of the 48-hour sessions. The results showed that on average, daytime mouth pH was 7.3, and during sleep it was 7.0. The mean mouth pH during sleep with mouth breathing was 6.6, ‘which was statistically significant compared with the normal sleep condition’.
Lead author Joanne Choi, a PhD student in the Faculty of Dentistry in the Sir John Walsh Research Institute at Otago, explains there were noticeable differences in variation of pH: “Intraoral pH decreased slowly over the hours of sleep in all participants, but showed greater falls over a longer period of time when participants were forced to mouth breathe At stages during the night, pH levels inside the mouth dropped to 3.6 in individuals who breathed through their mouths. This is well below the threshold (pH 5.5) for when tooth enamel starts to break down.”
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