Mouth breathing

[PloskoPlus]

I was sceptical about it and still think the effects are over stated, but there is a woman on Facebook who had a deviated septum as a child and ended up with a narrow maxilla and crowding due to mouth breathing. She had SARME to fix it. Her identical twin had no breathing issues and developed a normal maxilla.

[someone]

Doubt it to be honest. Seems like mouth-breathing is more of a symptom rather than a cause (that being a symptom of an underlying orthogantic issue). If you look up a lot of people with deviated septums they don't usually have any dental/orthogantic issues, instead they tend to have a slightly sunken eye/asymmetry.

[PloskoPlus]

Yeah, but you have to realise that our Paleolithic forebears with their massive skulls and jaws dropped dead at the age of 30. Infant mortality was stupendous. Frankly I think they simply cannibalized defective or weird looking kids.

[UnderMunch]

The thing with twins though is that they're never truly identical and certainly won't develop in a completely identical fashion, and whether or not that is due to genetics or environment is not completely certain. The difference in development doesn't happen the day they start mouth-breathing, but the day that they are born.

There's also been published some studies in the last 10 years that show identical twins aren't actually 100% the same when looking at their genomes: where one twin could have genes indicating risks of diseases like leukemia, the other twins wouldn't have those.

The professionals behind these studies suggest that we stop calling them "identical" and just say "one-egg twins".

[ppsk]

Yeah, but you have to realise that our Paleolithic forebears with their massive skulls and jaws dropped dead at the age of 30. Infant mortality was stupendous. Frankly I think they simply cannibalized defective or weird looking kids.

Thats often quipped but its not actually correct. The average was low, i.e life expectancy was low, because of numerous factors: high infant morality, wounds that would be easily treated now leading to fatal infections, tribal/fraternal warfare, deaths by wild animals, death by misadventure, etc.

They have found remains they estimate to be those of 70 year olds, and they were quite robust, so its not true that our forebears didn't have the capacity for long life...rather the environment was often the result of their demise.

[Lefortitude]

orthodontists say that the tongue is the dominant force in the face, and the rest of the bone structure, including dentition, follows the tongue.  Hence tongue thrust causes bad dental deformities.  it hence follows, and makes sense that, without the constant pressure from the tongue upwards on the maxilla (during mouth breathing) the face will subdue to gravity and grow downward instead of forward.  Mouth breathing is somethin orthodontists and maxfacs understand well as a cause for dentofacial deformity.

[Bowie]

Prof S said it's common knowledge that mouth breathing causes facial deformities in growing children and that everyone knows it. The question is, can it continue to effect adults?