Sleeping With Your Mouth Open Damages Teeth

Scientists have found that sleeping with the mouth open can be as damaging to teeth and this is because breathing through the mouth dries it out removing the protective effect of saliva, which has a natural ability to kill the bacteria in the mouth that produce acid and as acid levels rise through the night, tooth erosion and decay can begin.

The researchers believe the findings help to explain observations of dentists that people who sleep open-mouthed have higher rates of tooth decay. Tooth decay in mouth sleepers is often worse at the back and this is because the back of the mouth tends to get drier than the front. Patients with asthma and obstructive sleep apnoea are more likely to breathe through the mouth at night.  According to the study published in the Journal of Oral Rehabilitation, It is said that under normal conditions, the pH level in the mouth is a neutral level of 7.7 but if you sleep with the mouth wide open it reduced this to a mildly acidic average a pH of 6.6.

In some people, acidity levels rose as high as 3.6 and this is high enough to erode tooth enamel. If the mouth is open during sleep it dries out.  This triggers acid levels to rise, triggering tooth erosion. Men are most likely to be affected, as research has shown nearly a third breathe through their mouths while asleep, compared to just five per cent of women.

Joanne Choi, a sleep researcher at Otago University in New Zealand, and her colleagues created a device that can be clipped to the teeth at night, this device record the acidity levels and transmit data to a computer. She then asked 10 volunteers who were an average age of 25 to sleep with nose clamps so they were forced to breathe through their mouths on one night. On a second night, volunteers slept normally without the clamp.

Ms Choi, a PhD student, said: “This study is the first to continuously monitor intra-oral 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”