What are the dangers of snoring in children?

Many people know that snoring is a manifestation of sleep apnea. But many parents don’t think that children’s snoring may also be sleep-disordered breathing, and this disease is not only for adults. Clinically, the children who come to see the doctor are as old as teens and as young as a few months. Many children are because of frequent nasal congestion, tonsil inflammation, or because of poor academic performance, slow growth in height, easy to be excited, and prone to hair loss. Temper, inattention and other manifestations, transfer from other departments to respiratory department or sleep department.

Children frequently suffer from sleep apnea, which can lead to inability to concentrate during the day, fatigue, mental retardation, and inability to keep up with learning. Snoring can affect sleep quality, resulting in decreased growth hormone secretion, resulting in delayed growth and development. The child breathes through the mouth for a long time, and the airflow hits the hard palate for a long time. Over time, the face will be deformed, and the upper lip will be short and thick, the mandible will be drooping, the nasolabial fold will disappear, the hard palate will be high arched, and the teeth will be irregularly arranged, which is called “adenoid face”.

If parents find that their children are snoring, awake, breathing through their mouths, and turning over repeatedly during sleep, they should go to a regular hospital in time to monitor sleep breathing, record the electrical activities of the brain, eyes, heart, and muscles, as well as chest and abdominal breathing movements, nasal airflow, blood oxygen saturation, etc. Based on this, doctors can judge whether the child suffers from sleep-disordered breathing and choose a targeted treatment method. Plus1Health has a sleep recorder that can perform sleep apnea monitoring and sleep apnea screening.

Most children’s snoring is due to congenital diseases such as tonsillar hypertrophy, micrognathia, adenoid hypertrophy or pharyngeal stenosis; snoring caused by acquired factors is also increasing, such as obesity, study tension, etc., which mostly occurs in 5-12 years old period. Most of children’s snoring can be solved by changing unhealthy lifestyle and reasonable surgery. For example, snoring caused by congenital factors can be solved by removing hypertrophic tonsils and adenoids; snoring caused by pharyngeal stenosis caused by fat accumulation can be adjusted by diet and exercise. However, parents are very concerned about using a knife on their baby, and do not want such a small child to receive general anesthesia. In fact, after many children reach school age, the adenoids will begin to shrink, and they can hardly be seen when they become adults.

en_USEnglish