Does taping your mouth while you sleep have benefits?

Taping your mouth shut while sleeping might not sound appealing. But its proponents claim a vast array of benefits, from alleviating respiratory conditions to better-smelling breath and even a more chiselled jawline.

Breathing through your nose does have its benefits—small bony structures inside it, known as turbinates, filter air of debris and pathogens, for example. The nose also humidifies and warms incoming air, which is better for overall pulmonary health. Breathing like this can also increase the production of nitric oxide, which helps widen blood vessels and lower blood pressure while acting as a natural antimicrobial agent.

And breathing through the mouth can lead to problems—worsening snoring, oral health and obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), where breathing stops during sleep because throat muscles block the airway. Chronic mouth-breathing in children may also contribute to abnormal development of the face.

All this might suggest that some people would benefit from taping their mouths shut at night. Alas, the evidence does not bear this out. A systematic review of ten studies on mouth-taping for OSA, published in PLOS in May, showed some weak evidence for benefits. One study included in the review, published in Healthcare in 2022, showed that when 20 participants with mild OSA used mouth tape for one night, the median number of breathing interruptions per hour of sleep fell by roughly half. The number of snoring episodes also decreased by about half. A comparable study in Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery reported similar findings. Both studies, however, noted their small sample sizes and the PLOS review questioned the clinical significance of their results.

Mouth-taping might be more effective in treating OSA when combined with other therapies. A study in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society in 2022 found that wearing a mandibular advancement device—a special mouthguard used to treat OSA—and mouth-taping was more effective in treating the condition than just the mouthguard alone. However, studies with more participants, which also assess mouth-taping in isolation, are needed to draw more robust conclusions.

For those with severe OSA and a nasal obstruction, such as a deviated septum, mouth-taping could do more harm than good. The PLOS review cautioned against taping mouths shut in such cases, where a person’s airway was already significantly narrowed and mouth-taping could therefore pose a risk of asphyxiation.

Though mouth-taping for oral hygiene is more plausible—breathing through the mouth dries up saliva, which normally helps prevent tooth decay and bad breath—there are no robust studies yet to prove that it works. Claims that mouth-taping carve a sharper jawline are merely anecdotal, too.

Brian Rotenberg, an otolaryngologist at Western University in Canada, concludes that the risks of mouth-taping are not worth the potential gains. Those who persist with it, he says, might even be ignoring serious health problems. Difficulty with nasal breathing may indicate conditions such as nasal polyps, or even tumours. Such mouth breathers, he says, should get a diagnosis and treatment plan from a doctor instead of seeking a “quick fix” and taping their mouths shut.■