About Your Child’s Airway

In the ideal situation, your child’s airway is well-developed, uncompressed and can easily deliver oxygen from the lungs to the brain.  

In Sleep Disordered Breathing, problems with the airway can lead to less oxygen being delivered to the brain during sleep, which leads the child to start mouth breathing in order to compensate and receive more oxygen.  Mouth breathing, in turn, can lead to its own set of problems which only serve to compound the original Sleep Disordered Breathing problems.  

Problems caused by mouth breathing include: 

• Inflamed tonsils and adenoids
• Malposition of the teeth 
• Improper exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide

What causes airway restriction?

There are a number of causes of airway obstruction or restriction that can lead to Sleep Disordered Breathing including:

• large tonsils or adenoids
• obesity
• tongue or lower jaw abnormalities
• neuromuscular deficits which make airway control difficult
• Allergies
• Inflammation of the nasal passageways
• Poor tongue posture
• Deformities in the jaw from a long term habit of thumb sucking or pacifier use. 
• Narrow or high arched palate