What has been said?
Covering your mouth with tape when going to sleep serves as a home remedy to prevent snoring or treat insomnia and other sleep-related problems.
What do we know?
Breathing through your nose is the best way to do this, but covering your mouth has no proven benefit and can be dangerous for some people.
Some TikTok and Instagram videos that have accumulated tens of thousands of views claim that sleeping with your mouth covered with tape or adhesive plastic helps reduce snoring and is useful for avoiding insomnia, improving oral hygiene and increasing energy.
There is no published scientific evidence to support that covering your mouth with duct tape is beneficial to your health. In fact, the experts consulted by Verify They consider it dangerous. The few similar studies that exist are small (less than thirty participants) and are done on patients who snore and use tape or porous patches. Studies suggest that the practice can reduce snoring, but the results are not definitive, and in no case do they address other issues such as insomnia or oral hygiene.
Experts also warn that these home remedies should not replace well-studied medical solutions, especially when it comes to serious health problems.
Covering your mouth with tape while sleeping reduces snoring and improves health
Covering your mouth with adhesive tape as a method to reduce snoring and improve health has no scientific basis, they explain to Verify Maria Casasayas and Juan Ramon Gras, otorhinolaryngologists of the Sant Pau Hospital. Experts, in fact, consider it dangerous in people with respiratory problems. He reaches the same conclusion this article from Harvard Medical School, who details that in certain cases the practice “could significantly reduce a person’s oxygen levels when they sleep.”
The few studies that have investigated the effects of covering the mouth at night have focused on patients who snore and have obstructive apneaa condition in which the affected person stops breathing—or takes in too little air—in repeated brief episodes during sleep, as we explained. But this is very preliminary work, with twenty and thirty participantswhich have been carried out with porous materials such as tape—not adhesive tape—and on a very specific population. That is, the results cannot be extrapolated to the general population.
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An investigation from this same year conducted on 66 people with obstructive apnea, it found that the practice improved air flow in the majority of patients, but that it worsened it in some of them, because they had a blocked nose. In patients with asthma no beneficial effect has been found.
“These studies do not provide a basis for large-scale implementation of mouth covering to treat self-diagnosed sleep apnea, especially without adequate supervision,” writes the University College Cork physiologist. Ken O’Halloran in this editorial.
Breathe through your nose, rather than through your mouth
The idea for the practice comes from the fact that many people who suffer from obstructive sleep apnea sleep with their mouth open, and that this can worsen the symptoms, according to some studies. “Our body is made to breathe through the nose“, explain the experts at the Sant Pau Hospital, you should only breathe through the mouth in cases of exertion, when the body needs more air.
The nose, thank you to hairs and mucosa inside, filters dust and pathogens. This allows the air that reaches the lungs to be a little more filtered of particles and to have a higher temperature. The nasal passages too humidify the airwhich benefits the respiratory system.
The air that reaches the lungs is better when it’s hot and humid because it helps protect and optimize the functioning of the respiratory system. It contributes, for example, to avoiding dryness of the respiratory tract, maintaining a healthy layer of mucus that acts as a protective barrier against pathogens and contaminating particles.
Therefore, trying to force the body to breathe through the nose by mechanically blocking the mouth with adhesive tape is a practice that is neither healthy nor safe.
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