Children who snore should also be monitored for sleep

Many people know that snoring is a sign of sleep apnea. However, many parents do not think that children snoring may also be sleep apnea, and this disease is not only for adults. Clinically, many children are referred to respiratory or sleep departments from other departments because of frequent nasal congestion, tonsil inflammation, or because of poor academic performance, slow height development, agitation, temper tantrums, inattention and other manifestations. The children who come to the clinic are as old as teenagers and as young as a few months. Data from the Sleep Center of Beijing Children’s Hospital shows that in 2015, as many as 2,000 children visited the clinic due to snoring or abnormal breathing phenomenon in their sleep, and nearly half of them had sleep breathing disorders. Frequent occurrence of sleep apnea in children can cause lack of concentration, fatigue, lagging intellectual development, and failure to keep up with studies during the day, or induce high blood pressure, cardiac arrhythmia, respiratory failure and other diseases. Snoring will affect the quality of sleep, resulting in reduced secretion of growth hormone, resulting in growth retardation. Children breathe through their mouths for a long time, the airflow impacts the hard palate for a long time, and over time the face will be deformed, appearing short and thick upper lip, sagging jaw, nasolabial groove disappears, high arch of the hard palate, teeth are not neatly arranged and so on, which is called “adenoidal facial features”. If parents find that their children snore, wake up with their mouths open, breathe with their mouths open, and turn over repeatedly during sleep, they should go to a regular hospital in time for sleep apnea monitoring, which records the electrical activity of the brain, eyes, heart, and muscles, as well as the chest and abdominal respiratory movements, airflow through the mouth and nose, and oxygen saturation level, etc. The doctor can then determine whether the child has adenoid facies. Doctors can judge whether the child suffers from sleep breathing disease accordingly, and choose the treatment in a targeted way. Most children snoring originates from congenital diseases such as enlarged tonsils, micrognathia, adenoid hypertrophy or narrowing of pharyngeal cavity, etc. Snoring caused by acquired factors is also becoming more and more common, such as obesity, study tension, etc., which mostly occurs during the period of 5 to 12 years old. Most of the snoring in children can be solved by changing bad lifestyle and reasonable surgery. For example, snoring caused by congenital factors can be solved by removing enlarged tonsils and adenoids; snoring caused by pharyngeal stenosis due to fat accumulation can be solved by adjusting diet and enhancing exercise. However, parents are apprehensive about going under the knife on their babies and do not want to subject such young children to general anesthesia. In fact, many children’s adenoids will begin to shrink when they reach school age and will be almost invisible by the time they become adults. In order not to affect the child’s health and education, parents can choose pediatric breathing masks, which work by sending pressurized air into the respiratory tract through a sealed nasal mask, which is conducive to opening up the narrow airway and maintaining smooth breathing, thus improving the problem of snoring and lack of oxygen in babies. Nowadays, many pediatric masks take into account children’s bone structure, facial features and skin sensitivity to provide maximum comfort and reliability; they also provide a larger field of vision, so that children can clearly see their mothers and fathers, as well as parents can see their children’s eyes, and more peace of mind between parents and children.