How a tiny sting under the tongue impacts breathing, feeding, sleep and jaw growth
Tongue-tie is not just a phrase or a metaphor for stumbling over your words. It is actually an oral condition that can impact many things like breathing, speech, jaw growth and overall well-being of a person. While the research for tongue-tie is still evolving there are many misunderstandings revolving around this. If your child has been diagnosed with tongue-tie, here’s what you need to know.
What are tongue-ties?
Tongue-tie is a tiny string of tissues that attaches the tongue to the floor of your mouth. It may interfere with essential functions such as sucking, swallowing, eating, drinking, chewing, breathing, speech, and digestion. Additionally, it can also hamper breast feeding, which is considered crucial not just in terms of weight gain for the infant, but also for developing the right tongue function for a correct jaw development. Mothers start looking out for help when they have been exhausted from the breastfeeding journey or start supplementing bottles under the notion that they have insufficient milk production. The failure to diagnose tongue and lip ties at this crucial moment affects the jaw growth of a child.
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How to identify if your child has a tie?
Some of the more common signs and symptoms of a tongue-tie include nipple pain and trauma in the mother, as well as infant issues such as, prolonged or painful latching and long feeding hours. Incomplete breast drainage after feeding, mastitis or infected nipples is also some symptoms. These indications are often misunderstood and missed by both doctors as well as mothers. Often mothers, due to the social stigma associated with breastfeeding, often do not speak to a doctor or anyone else about the problems they are facing and eventually the tongue-tie go undetected. Similarly, in children some common symptoms are short sleep episodes, delayed speech, difficulty in brushing, gaging easily especially while eating, and trouble with chewing solids, sluggish eater, frequent cold, cough and allergies.
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Risks of an untreated tongue tie
As we have seen that this tiny sting under our tongue can have a huge impact on a persons’ overall growth there are a few other issues faced if the tongue tie goes untreated or undetected. It is often observed that children are selective in chewing solid foods; there are speech defects, improper jaw growth, crooked teeth, sucking habits, long term bed wetting, snoring, frequent nasal allergies and throat infections, teeth grinding hyperactivity, lack of attention leading to poor academic performance. Hence it is important to treat the tongue tie as soon as it has been identified. It is important to note that a tongue tie cannot be diagnosed by seeing if the child can stick its tongue outside the mouth.
Treatment for tongue tie
The decision to treat a tongue-tie often depends on the severity. While some doctors prefer to take the wait-and-see approach for very mild cases, others will recommend a frenotomy, also known as frenectomy, which is the procedure used to release the lingual frenulum.
