AURICULOTHERAPY FOR SLEEP BRUXISM IN CHILDREN: A SERIES OF CASES

Abstract

Introduction: Sleep bruxism is defined as a behavior that causes masticatory muscle activities during sleep. Sleep bruxism in childhood leads to consequences, which may vary from teeth wear in deciduous dentition to temporomandibular disfunction symptoms. There’s no data that demonstrates improvement of children with sleep bruxism during and after auricular acupuncture treatment. Objective: Therefore, this case report series aimed to evaluate the effect of auriculotherapy on children presenting sleep bruxism. Methods: Twelve patients were included in this study, in the mean age of 6,9. The diagnosis was evaluated by the question: “Does your kid grind their teeth while sleeping?”. Treatment was performed by an acupuncture specialist in a standardized way. The therapy was given for three weeks and the effect was evaluated through a sleep diary, in which the parents noted whether or not their child grinded teeth while sleeping before (baseline) and during therapy (T1 to T3). Sleep bruxism was categorized as presence or absence of nocturnal teeth grinding and the frequency varied from 0 to 7 (baseline), 0 to 5 (T1), 0 to 7 (T2) and 0 to 4 (T3) between patients. The intensity of the reported sleep bruxism was compared according to the periods by pared T-test ( =0.05). Results: It was observed that the frequency of reports decreased significantly from baseline to T3. Conclusion: These results suggest that ear acupuncture may be an alternative therapy for sleep bruxism in childhood, once it demonstrated to reduce its frequency in this study, although patients may present different effects to therapy due to biological variability.