Grind your teeth at night? You may be suffering from other sleep disorders, as well. That’s the finding of a study published in the journal Sleep Medicine in January.
Researchers found that sleep bruxism — the repetitive jaw-muscle movement characterized by clenching or grinding teeth during sleep — was prevalent in adults with a variety of other sleep disorders. Sleep bruxism sufferers also had a higher occurrence of restless legs syndrome, periodic limb movement during sleep, sleep-related gastroesophageal reflux disease, REM behavior disorder, and sleep-related epilepsy, compared with the general population.
“Even though the specific mechanisms behind the associations between SB and other sleep-related disorders have not been identified yet, considering all the available evidence, sleep arousals could be a common factor with which all the identified disorders are associated, except RBD and Parkinson’s disease,” the authors wrote.
