NursingLink

Heavy Breathing Precedes Nocturnal Teeth Grinding

Aug 28 - A significant increase in breathing amplitude precedes sleep bruxism, suggesting that it is an exaggerated component of a normal process, Canadian researchers report in the August issue of Chest.
"For decades," senior investigator Dr. Gilles J. Lavigne of the University of Montreal told Reuters Health, "the causes of tooth grinding during sleep" were primarily believed to be "stress and dental occlusion."
"It is now known," he continued, "that an intense activation of a sleep sentinel... to prepare a sleeping organism to react or adjust to any changes or threat during sleep, is the main driver of the excessive muscle forces applied to your dentition during sleep."
Sleep arousals, added Dr. Lavigne, "occur 10 to 15 times per hour of sleep and are a normal activity associated with a rise in cardiac and respiratory outputs that last 3 to 10 seconds."
To gain further information on the matter, Dr. Lavigne and his colleagues studied polygraphic sleep recordings of 20 sleep bruxism patients who had no sleep-related breathing disorders.
The team found that 4 seconds before the rhythmic masticatory muscle activity (RMMA) associated with tooth grinding began, there was an 8 to 23% increase in respiration amplitude. This continued to increase and reached its maximum of 108% to 206% during RMMA and then rapidly returned to pre-episode levels.
There was a significant correlation between RMMA episodes and respiratory amplitude. Compared to arousal alone, breathing amplitude was 11 times higher when arousal was associated with RMMA.
"It is now suggested," concluded Dr. Lavigne, "that sleep bruxism is a natural but too intense reaction of the body that is part of a reset system for all autonomic functions including respiration during sleep."

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