Why does a child snore in a dream and what to do?

Snoring, which publish adults, does not cause as many questions as children. This phenomenon in the understanding of most parents does not fit in with the tender childhood age, and therefore, with the characteristic sounds from the children's bedroom, moms and dads get a lot of guesswork about what is happening with the child. In this article we will explain why children snore and what to do about it.

Snoring in medicine is called low-frequency sounds, which become audible if there is some obstacle in the respiratory organs that interferes with the normal free circulation of air during inhalation and exhalation. Usually, a sound that is difficult to confuse with something is caused by the vibration of the palatine septum. In the state of activity and wakefulness, it acts as a dividing wall between the respiratory and digestive organs. In a dream, when all muscles relax, this partition also relaxes. It performs the function of a mechanical barrier in most cases.

However, snoring them can not be considered, this sniff. It should be treated as a physiological norm. Every second small child sniffs. Snoring is not the norm under any circumstances. Children's snoring always has pathological reasons, which is why it cannot be ignored and hoped that the child will “outgrow” this problem. Another question is that these reasons can be easily removable or rather difficult to resist correction.

The simplest cause of child snoring is an uncomfortable position in a dream. If the baby throws back his head, then the palatine wall can vibrate in a relaxed state due to the force of the pain. To solve this problem, it is enough to lay the child on its side and check whether it is convenient for him in bed.

Snoring can occur on the background of nasal congestion. If a small child lives in a room where parents carefully place a heater so that the child does not freeze, too dry air rather quickly contributes to drying out of the mucous membranes of the upper respiratory tract, which leads to nasal congestion. A narrow nasal passages, which are also clogged with dried mucus, create the same mechanical barrier to free breathing. The child, when asleep, begins to breathe through the mouth, this leads to the vibration of the palatine muscle.

Doctors often refer to such problems as age-related ones, as the airways grow, they also grow, change, become wider, straighter, and the problem is solved.

On this, the harmless causes of child snoring can be considered exhausted. If the child has respiratory organs without features, the room is rather damp and not hot, the baby sleeps in a comfortable bed, on a hard orthopedic mattress, without a pillow, does not throw his head back, and snoring is still observed, then he will have to look for the reason with the doctor.

Next, consider the possible diseases.

Most often, children snore at night due to nose problems. Rhinitis can be caused by a cold, viruses, an allergic reaction, at least - a bacterial infection.Characteristic night sounds in a dream do not begin with a cold, they usually mean that rhinitis is already complicated.

When viral infection is usually at the initial stage there are liquid snot, as in hypothermia. If the child was given the wrong help or did not give it at all, the mucus may thicken and clog the nasal passages. It may dry out due to excessively dry indoor air. In allergic rhinitis, the nose often lays without snot at all.

Tonsils, which take on a large load, protecting the child from numerous viruses and bacteria that penetrate by airborne droplets, are susceptible to growth. At the time of illness, they increase to activate the strength of local immunity. But if the child is sick often, then the tonsils simply do not have time to decrease and the hypertrophy becomes pathological.

Hypertrophied pharyngeal tonsil, expanding, completely or partially covers the lumen of the nasal passages. In this case, night snoring will not be the only symptom of pathology. During the daytime, the child will also breathe through the mouth, with a significant degree of the disease, oxygen metabolism is disturbed, the child suffers from a lack of oxygen, his activity and attention are reduced, and a cough may be observed. Snoring disappears as treatment. Adenoids of the first and second degree are treated conservatively., third degree adenoids, and adnoiditis, not amenable to conservative therapy, treated surgically - overgrown lymphoid tissue is completely or partially removed.

This is one of the most terrible causes of snoring. The danger of apnea is intermittent breathing. The child may begin to suffer from breathing delays in his sleep. Too long breath holdings can lead to the death of a baby. Snoring, by the way, is not the main symptom of apnea. But his parents can be suspicious if, besides snoring at night, the baby often coughs, sleeps restlessly, often wakes up, sweats heavily in a dream, suffers nightmares, if breathing stops for more than 15-20 seconds.

Obstructive sleep apnea is caused by adenoids, sore throats, other diseases associated with swelling and narrowing of the airways. Central apnea is a pathology that becomes possible due to disturbances in brain activity. It happens and mixed apnea, when two starting factors lie at the root of the problem. After the treatment, which the pediatrician and otolaryngologist have to deal with, the baby begins to sleep peacefully, in 98% of cases it is possible to cure apnea without the risk of relapse.

Overweight children snore much more often than their lean and ascetic peers. This is due to the fact that fatty tissue is deposited not only under the skin, but also in the intermuscular space, which leads to a narrowing of the throat. Children who were born with a weight of more than 4 kilograms are most at risk of overweight. However, talking about congenital obesity is not worth it, this problem happens only in 0.5% of cases.

If the child snores, and the doctors did not reveal any ENT pathologies, this is a reason to soberly assess the weight of the child. Obesity is the excess of the age norm by 15% or more. You can independently calculate the body mass index and sound the alarm after the value of 30 units. And you can simply assess the state of the child according to universal pediatric tables, which indicate the upper and lower weight standards for each age.If a child in 2-3 years weighs more than 20 kilograms, then there is nothing surprising in snoring.

There are several types of malocclusion, in which the child begins to snore even in the absence of a runny nose and nasal congestion. To understand whether the bite affects the breath, will help the dentist. If he diagnoses a mesial or distal occlusion (it is in their presence that parents most often complain about children's snoring), he will send an orthopedist who will select a correction tool, a mouth guard or braces, and also teach you to do special exercises for the maxillofacial muscles at home.

The reason for the night snoring child can be a variety of pathologies of ENT organs. These are polyps in the nasopharynx, and possible tumors in the upper respiratory tract. Often snoring accompanies sinusitis, as well as the curvature of the nasal septum, which could be due to injury or surgery.

Each pathology needs a separate approach to treatment, after which usually the child’s sleep normalizes completely.

If you do not engage in snoring, do not look for its true cause and hope that with age everything will go away by itself, then the negative changes in the child’s well-being will not take long to wait. The main problem will be that the disease, which caused the unpleasant night “trills” performed by the child, will remain untreated, and may even begin to progress.

The snoring child, although he himself practically does not hear the sound that makes, sleeps shallowly. He may wake up many times a night, although he himself may not remember this later. However, the deterioration in the quality of sleep directly affects the state of health of the children during the daytime. Snoring children learn worse, they find it harder to concentrate, they have problems remembering poetry and educational material. Chronic lack of sleep leads to the development of various chronic diseases and adversely affects the state of the growing body's nervous system.

The most dangerous is when periods of snoring coincide with age crises that almost every kid lives. So, snoring at 3 years old, at 5-6 years old can provoke negative changes in the child’s behavior - closure, aggressiveness will appear. Constant fatigue causes many failures, which are very painfully experienced by a child.

Children with chronic and prolonged snoring are more likely to develop cardiovascular diseases. Kids who accompany their nightly sleep with low-frequency peals often suffer from respiratory viral diseases. A healthy, sufficiently hydrated mucosa is more effective in deterring attacks from viruses during periods of widespread illness. While the mucous membrane, which has dried out from frequent mouth breathing, cannot adequately resist the aggressive influence from the outside, local immunity weakens, as a result, the child does not have time to recover, as he again "picks up" another infection.

Infrequently, only 2-3% of cases, ordinary snoring develops into a real problem - sleep apnea, and this is a real risk to the life of the child, because spontaneous cessation of breathing, of which there may be several hundred overnight, leads not only to brain hypoxia with all the ensuing neurological problems that follow,but also to the possible death of the child from suffocation.

Snoring can greatly complicate the child's communication with peers, because at a certain age, summer recreation camps, hiking trips, joint trips will begin, where friends will begin to point out to the child that he is snoring and does not allow others to sleep.

Noticing that the child is snoring, you should not immediately take him to the doctors. First you need to carefully observe - at what time snoring begins, what can provoke him, whether there are signs of possible diseases listed above. To start the microclimate should be put in order in the room where the child sleeps. The air temperature should not exceed 20-21 degrees, and the relative humidity of the air should be in the range of 50-70%. It is important to thoroughly air the room before bedtime.

Baby's bed should be comfortable. It is best to buy an orthopedic mattress and an orthopedic pillow for a snoring child, which eliminates the physical possibility of tilting your head up in a dream.

It is useful for young children to introduce cool baths before bedtime and a mandatory relaxing massage. In the daytime, you should increase the amount of time the child spends outdoors in the open air. For adolescents, the recommendations are the same. For children of any age, it is important not to overeat before bedtime, but also not to go to bed hungry. If there is excess weight, it is important to adjust the baby's nutrition, make it balanced, add vitamins to the diet and increase physical activity during the daytime.

It is worth starting a search with a visit to a pediatrician and then an otolaryngologist. These specialists will be able, with a high degree of probability, to detect existing problems with ENT organs already during the first visual inspection. Then, if necessary, tests are prescribed and treatment begins.

If the ENT doctor says that there are no pathologies, the child should be shown to the neurologist.and also undergo specific diagnostics - polysomnography. This method allows you to evaluate the activity of the body during sleep, to understand which organs and systems work during the rest period incorrectly. Polysomnography is carried out in specialized clinics and centers.

The procedure takes the whole night, during which the child, accompanied by one of the parents, simply sleeps on a comfortable bed in his usual position. Dozens of different sensors, which are attached to the child before bedtime, fix everything - from brain electrical pulses, cardiograms, changes in the frequency and depth of breathing to the slightest involuntary movements of the eyeballs, fingers. This survey is not made under the policy of compulsory health insurance, it is paid. The average cost in Russia is from 10 thousand rubles.

An important indicator for the pediatrician will be the amount of oxygen in the blood, tests will have to be taken several times so that the doctor can understand whether the child has hypoxia and how strongly it is expressed. Usually, there are no misunderstandings with the diagnosis of the causes of children's snoring - the reason is quickly, it allows you to start timely treatment, the effectiveness of which parents will be able to judge as the unpleasant night sounds disappear.

Specialists do not recommend treating children's snoring with folk remedies. In most cases it is completely ineffective. Moreover, there are many rather curious ways to treat snoring, which can not be any other therapy.

Such methods include CPAP therapy. This is a method in which in the sleep the lungs are artificially ventilated with constant positive pressure. The disadvantage is that the device is equipped with a special nasal mask and a flexible tube, through which the special compressor supplies oxygen. At home, the application is difficult. But a number of clinics in Russia offer such procedures, and their effectiveness is rated very high. 2-3 weeks of such treatment are enough, and the problem with night snoring is solved safely.

It is interesting to use special electrical devices that fix snoring and send the most subtle electrical impulse to a person, as a result of which the child changes body position and snoring stops.

The most exotic way to save a child from snoring - buy him an Australian tune didgeridoo. It is possible to extract sounds from it only with a special breathing technique that perfectly trains the nasopharynx and larynx, strengthens the muscles of the respiratory organs. Snoring is pretty fast.

What can not be done with children's snoring:

• The big mistake of parents who noticed that the child is snoring in a dream, start to wake him up immediately. This does not solve the problems, but it strongly shatters the child’s already imperfect nervous system.
• Do not frighten the child in a dream, clap his hands over his ear, whistle and try to use other incredible folk ways to silence the snoring. If the baby wakes up at this moment, and this is quite likely, then he can be very scared.
• You can not try to cure snoring with sedatives and sedatives. They relax muscles even more, and the likelihood of a sudden stop in breathing increases significantly.

Any child can start snoring under the influence of provoking factors. Therefore, it is easier to prevent the emergence of rolling night sounds, than to look for their cause and treat the child:

• To make the sleep calm and breathing even, one should not only ventilate and moisten the room, but also remove from the child's bedroom everything that can accumulate dust - soft toys, carpets, books that are not stored in the closet. Dusty air lies in the mechanism of the occurrence of many allergic reactions, which then directly participate in the swelling and constriction of the respiratory tract. Only clean air allows the baby to breathe deeply and get enough sleep.
• Up to 2 years old do not teach the child to pillows, and in 3-4 years it is worth buying a child a special baby pillow in an orthopedic salon. It will help to form the habit of sleeping in the correct and comfortable postures that do not allow snoring. Sleeping on soft feather beds, down pillows is not only dangerous, in terms of the possibility of developing an allergy to a feather, but also in terms of developing breathing problems during sleep.

• If the child has a cold or has a stuffy nose, you should definitely clear nasal passages from mucus. Until the age of one year, an aspirator is used for this purpose; it is important to teach older children to blow their nose properly. This will prevent chronic rhinitis, in which the child moves to mouth breathing.
• All colds, viral and ENT diseases should be treated timely and right. This will reduce the risk of developing chronic pathologies that can lead to an unpleasant night sound in a dream.
• Too long craving at the pacifier at an early age can result pathological changes of bite and all related issues, including snoring. Also, the child must receive solid food in a timely manner, otherwise his bite will simply not be able to form correctly.
• Weight reduction of only 5% of the total mass bodies allows in most cases of snoring associated with obesity to get rid of the unpleasant night sound phenomenon.

• To strengthen the muscles of the nasopharynx and larynx will be useful perform simple exercises in the form of a game. The muscles of the palate and the tongue are reinforced by the unloved by the parents, but by their children, sticking the tongue to its maximum length. Ideally, the child should reach the tip of the tongue to the middle of the chin.
• Pharyngeal and chewing muscles can be strengthened with a pencil., which should be asked to hold the child tightly in the teeth. Singing the vowel sound "And" to various motifs helps strengthen all the maxillofacial muscles. And rinsing the throat with ordinary boiled water is useful not only for the throat itself, but also for the muscles of the larynx, whose strength is so important for quiet and even breathing in a dream.
• A child who is prone to snoring during colds must be shown Key exercises respiratory gymnastics method Strelnikova. It will be useful to do them with the child, for example, while walking in the fresh air.

What if small child snores? All the causes of child snoring reveals Dr. Komarovsky.