By: Victoria Pavelko, MS, CCC-SLP
Happy Better Speech & Hearing Month… Cheers to celebrating Speech – Language Pathology, a field less than a century old that continues to thrive on evidenced based research. So let’s take a moment to learn about Drooling!
Let’s start with saliva:
The salivary glands in our mouth produce as much as 2-3 pints of saliva every day. We must swallow regularly to prevent any extra from slipping out of our lips or from seeping backwards into our airway. If saliva falls backwards over the tongue base, our natural reaction is to gag and cough.
What Causes Drooling?
An overproduction of saliva can lead to problems swallowing and trouble controlling liquid in the mouth. Drooling is observed when saliva/oral secretions fall from the mouth. During the infant/toddler ‘teething’ years, drooling is quite normal. As teeth erupt from the gums, the mouth produces excess saliva to soothe the ache and heal the gums. After all the teeth come through the gumline, drooling behaviors subside.
Adults may drool because of changes in the mouth such as a tooth removal, illness, or combination of routine medications. Often, it is not ONE specific medication that causes drooling, but a COMBINATION of them. Neurological conditions, such as Parkinsons, often present with excessive drooling. However, it is often not that a person is producing more saliva, but not swallowing as often as needed.
Why Do We Need Saliva?
Speech – Saliva lubricates and protects the lips, teeth, tongue, and all other areas within the mouth. When the mouth is too dry, speaking and swallowing can be difficult and uncomfortable.
Eating – When chewing, the tongue mixes food with saliva to moisten and prepare it for swallowing. Dry, crunchy, crumbling foods (crackers, potato chips), require more saliva than soft foods like mashed potatoes. Digestion starts in the mouth as saliva breaks down and dissolves fats and sugars in our food. Saliva also dissolves any excess food caught in our teeth to protect them from decay. GI physicians recommend patients with GERD (reflux disease) to chew their food “longer” to decrease the amount of work the stomach must do to process the food.
Speech Pathologists use the following strategies to decrease drooling:
Brush the teeth and rinse the mouth regularly after meals
Eat foods of different temperatures, tastes, and textures to improve sensory stimulation inside the mouth (popsicles, warm soup).
Use a mirror to frequently check and clean the face and clear pieces of food stuck in the teeth that the patient can not feel.
Additional treatments that Speech Pathologists will consider/recommend:
Exercises to improve the muscle tone, strength, sensitivity, movement, and stability of the structures in and around the mouth.
Cues and prompts from a caregiver to improve the swallowing frequency
Prescribed drugs that help decrease the production of saliva
Radiation therapy to decrease the production of saliva
Surgery on the glands inside the mouth; including possibility of Botox injections.
Schedule an appointment with one of our speech language pathologists to help with the management of saliva and drooling.