Mouth Breathing and Prevalence of Sleep Bruxism among Preschoolers aged 2 to 5 years

Abstract

Objective: To determine the prevalence of bruxism, associating it with mouth breathing in preschool children in Florianopolis, Brazil. Material and Methods: Clinical examination and questions to parents/guardians of 429 children aged 2-5 were conducted. The clinical examination was performed by three calibrated examiners to register the presence of tooth wear on incisors and molars. The questions were related to sleep bruxism (teeth grinding) and mouth breathing. For determinate diagnosis, were "possible" bruxism by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and "probable" bruxism, whereas the Item Response Theory was employed for mouth breathing. To determine the associations, a Chi-square test and Fisher exact test with a standard error of 5% and 95% interval confidence were applied. Results: The clinical examination revealed bruxism in 8.2%, whereas the parental report revealed bruxism in 17.2%. When clinical examination was associated with the parent's report, bruxism was present in 2.1%. Among the non-clinical variables, the most prevalent changes included: child presenting a regular stuffy nose (19.6%), followed by child is always open-mouthed (16.1%). A significant statistical association between bruxism and age was obtained (p<0.05), the age group with prevalence of 4 and 5 years old with 68.9%. There was no mouth breathing association with the presence of bruxism (p>0.05). Conclusion: Bruxism was prevalent for children aged 4-5 and bruxism had no association with mouth breathing.

Prevalence of Sleep Bruxism and associated factors in Tanta Preschool Children

“…This result is in agreement with results of the previous studies Seraj et al, (2010), Vieira-Andrade et al, (2014), and Miamoto et al, (2011) which showed that no significant association between age and bruxism in a pediatric population (19)(20)(21). In contrast, this result disagreed with Soare et al, (2018) (22) who found a significant relationship between age and bruxism.…”

“…This result agreed with the previous studies by Fonseca et al, (2011), Seraj et al, (2010) and Demirbag et al, (2014) which showed that no significant association between gender and bruxism (16,19,23). On the contrary to some researchers Cheifetz et al, (2005) (24) and Soares et al, (2018) (22) who reported bruxism is more prevalent in boys. This may be due to different sample sizes, and conduction of the study in the pediatric dental offices.…”

“…Likewise, the present study confirmed the significant association between bruxism and mouth breathing with a prevalence of 23.0%, this result was in agreement with a study previously informed by Simões-Zenari et al, (2010) (7) and Motta et al, (2014) (29). On contrary, the study by Soares et al, (2018) (22) found few children with mouth breathing had bruxism. These differences may be due to variability in the number of samples, and they used diagnosis test of mouth breathing besides the questionnaire.…”