Breathe Easy: All You Need to Know About Kids' Tonsils & Adenoids with Dr Emily Perry - Part 1

Snoring, hearing loss, conductive hearing loss.

How would they end up with you? Like where would they have been

diagnosed with that? So they've usually seen a GP.

general practitioner, or their dentist is often a big referral base now because there's a lot of awareness of the role of mouth breathing and potentially its impact on dentition, jaw growth, those sorts of things.

And people usually go to the dentist with their kids, whether it's every six months or 12 months.

So there's someone looking in their child's mouth specifically.

Yeah.

And so they will notice their mouth breathing, big tonsils, snottiness, that sort of thing.

So where that's dental, that tends to be slightly later.

Otherwise, when they're younger, you've got the kid that's just snotty, that just mouth breathes, sounds like Darth Vader all the time, just snorting.

irritable, angry sort of kid.

And it sort of tends to, there's sort of these waves based on tissue growth.

So whether that's the adenoids in that sort of two-year-old and then the tonsils in the four-year-old.

Emily, can I just jump in there and ask quickly, we all know what tonsils are.

We've looked down our kids' mouths, we've looked at our own.

What actually are adenoids? Can you tell us? They're

exactly the same sort of tissue as tonsils, but they just occur at the back of the nose.

So it's like this ring of tonsillar tissue that includes the back of the tongue as well, but that doesn't tend to grow and obstruct in children.

But adenoids grow first, and so the kid will tend to – it becomes like a plug of tissue at the back of the nose, so they can't breathe through their nose.

Right.

And so you sort of unplug it.

And then they can breathe much better.

They can be really snotty, rubbing their nose, sort of the kid that has that mid-face sort of open mouth.

You know, there's that insult, you're a mouth breather.

Oh, yeah.