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Jaws: The Story Of A Hidden Epidemic

Jaws: The Story Of A Hidden Epidemic
by Sandra Kahn, DDS, MSD, and Paul Ehrlich, PHD

There is a serious hidden epidemic that the public health community is just discovering. Its most obvious symptom is the growing frequency of children with crooked teeth wearing braces. But it also includes snoring, jaws hanging open, frequent stuffy noses, attention and behavioral problems, unrecognized disturbed sleeping (sleep apnea), and a general decline of physical appearance.

These symptoms indicate a building medical emergency that will likely catapult dentists, orthodontists, and sleep scientists into the front line of public health professionals. The emergency lies in the collection of serious diseases connected with mouth breathing and disturbed sleep, including heart disease, cancer, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, schizophrenia, suicide, asthma, and perhaps Alzheimer’s disease.

Disturbed sleep is an extremely serious stressor of the human mind and body. Among other things, it tends to depress the immune system, making an individual much more vulnerable to a wide variety of diseases and resulting in myriad modifications to the brain that are only partially understood. Add to this the large contributions of sleep deprivation to highway accidents, medical mistakes, and poor performance at work and in school, and you can see how important this unrecognized public health emergency is.

The Dental Connection

The dental connection comes from poor jaw development, which can be traced back to environmental changes resulting from industrialization. One primary cause is a lifestyle that reduces the amount of chewing a developing child needs to do. Since industrialization, children are no longer weaned to the relatively tough foods their parents eat. Instead, they are switched to soupy baby foods.

Indeed, in their early lives, children often transition from pablum to a fast food diet that is becoming increasingly soft and liquid-like. Few kids get to gnaw on a tough buffalo haunch, instead feasting on hamburgers, cakes and candies that melt in their mouth, sugary soft drinks, and the like.

When mothers can nurse, many cannot do it for long enough, or they may pump their breast milk and have a caregiver deliver it through a bottle. They recognize this is excellent for the child’s nutrition, but nursing directly from the breast exercises the jaw muscles. Having milk poured into their mouths from a bottle, not so much.

Read full article on Dentistry Today.