Breaking social media fads and uncovering the safety and efficacy of mouth taping in patients with mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing, or obstructive sleep apnea: A systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Social media has contributed to a potentially unsafe trend of nighttime mouth taping for individuals with mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing, or sleep apnea as a home remedy to treat these issues. This systematic review is aimed to highlight any potential benefits or harms with this practice. METHODS: A comprehensive librarian-designed literature search was performed using PRISMA guidelines. Using search terms, "mouth taping, adhesive mouthpiece, porous oral patch, surgical tape, breathing mouthpiece, sleep, microsleep, breath, breathing, or mouth breathing", MEDLINE, Embase, and Google Scholar were searched from February 1999 to February 2024. Covidence software was used for screening and data entry performed into a data collection sheet designed a priori. RESULTS: Covidence software was utilized to screen 120 articles. After 34 duplicates were removed, 86 articles were screened by two independent reviewers. Sixty-two were excluded. Twenty-four went on to full text review and 10 met inclusion criteria with a total of 213 patients. Two studies showed statistically significant improvement in established markers of sleep apnea such as apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) or oxygen desaturations. Other studies showed that mouth taping offered no differences and even discussed potential risks including asphyxiation in the presence of nasal obstruction. Many studies excluded anyone with nasal obstruction or pathology. CONCLUSION: The social media trend of mouth taping for individuals with mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing, or sleep apnea has been reviewed. Based on the data presented by these 10 different studies, it seems that there is a potentially serious risk of harm for individuals indiscriminately practicing this trend. Further studies are required to elucidate any clinical benefit this practice may have.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".