The quality of sleep modified by the mouth breathing syndrome can impair the athlete's physical performance

Abstract

Objective: to identify, through the literature, whether a mouth breathing syndrome can influence the athlete's physical performance. Material and Methods: the search strategy employed the term sleep with the boolean operator and to the descriptors: athletic performance, oral breathing and mouth breathing. Also used the term athlete with the boolean operator and to the descriptors: oral breathing and mouth breathing. For a more current reading, only articles published since 2000 were selected. It was carried out a reading of the selected and excluded articles that did not contemplate the proposed theme. Results: the athlete's physical performance is coordinated with different factors, which involve individual and environmental characteristics, indicating a timely relation in the periodization of training. The achievement of the best result involves the adaptive processes related to the activation of innumerable signaling pathways, which are subject the action of these factors, causing subsequent metabolic responses. Sleep disturbances associated with respiratory flow, as observed in mouth breathing syndrome, can be considered as factors influencing physical performance, indicating a need for new perceptions about an understanding of the variables that involve the performance. Conclusion: a mouth breather syndrome may be a potential modifying factor of the sleep and of the humoral and cellular immune response, thus influencing biophysiological events that present a common inflammatory profile, such as those occurring in physical performance.