What ten poor-quality studies say about taping your mouth shut at night
A 2025 PLOS One systematic review found ten mouth-taping studies, all rated poor quality, four of them discussing risks. Here is what it did and did not show.
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Mouth taping has not been shown to improve sleep in people who just want to sleep better, and a 2025 systematic review of the practice concluded that “the existing data does not support mouth taping or oral occlusion as a sound clinical intervention for the general population with sleep disordered breathing.” The review, published in PLOS One on May 21, 2025, found ten studies, rated every one of them poor quality, and counted four that discussed safety risks.
What did the 2025 mouth-taping review look for?
Jess Rhee, Alla Iansavitchene, Sonya Mannala, M. Elise Graham and Brian Rotenberg titled their paper “Breaking social media fads and uncovering the safety and efficacy of mouth taping in patients with mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing, or obstructive sleep apnea: A systematic review.” They searched MEDLINE and Embase through OVID, plus Google Scholar, for English-language work from February 1999 to February 2024. The funnel was narrow: 120 records, 34 duplicates removed, 86 abstracts screened, 24 full texts read, ten studies kept.
Ten studies across twenty-five years is roughly one every two and a half years, which is a thin shelf to build a bedtime trend on. The studies were too different from each other to pool into a meta-analysis, and the authors scored each with the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. All ten came out “Poor.”
One small oddity shows how loosely the evidence base holds together. The abstract reports 213 participants in total. The results text gives 233.
Who actually benefited in the studies that found something?
The abstract says two studies showed a statistically significant improvement in sleep apnea markers, meaning the apnea-hypopnea index or oxygen desaturation. The results section names Lee et al. and Huang et al. as those two. The discussion section says three, because it also counts Labarca et al., a trial that paired taping with a mandibular advancement device and compared the pair against the device alone. Inside a single paper, the count of positive studies is two or three depending on the page.
The review’s own title limits it to people with mouth breathing, sleep-disordered breathing or obstructive sleep apnea. So even the favorable results come from patients being studied, so they say nothing about healthy sleepers deciding to try a roll of tape from a drugstore.
What are the risks of sealing your lips overnight?
Four of the ten studies discussed risks, among them asphyxiation when the nose is blocked and regurgitation or aspiration. The authors summarize the position bluntly: “there is a potentially serious risk of harm for individuals indiscriminately practicing this trend.” They also state that “further studies are required to elucidate any clinical benefit this practice may have,” which is a polite way of saying the benefit has not been established.
The review does not say tape is dangerous for everyone. Nobody can say in advance who the exception is, though, and the trend’s audience is people who have not been evaluated.
What should you do about mouth breathing and snoring instead?
Mouth breathing that persists, loud snoring, pauses in breathing noticed by a partner, and sleepiness that outlasts a full night are reasons for a clinical sleep evaluation, typically a home sleep apnea test or an overnight study in a lab, rather than a reason to seal the mouth. A wearable alert can be the nudge that starts that process, and people who get an Apple Watch apnea notification have a sequence of steps worth following. A diagnosis that ends in a CPAP prescription then raises the question of keeping a fixed wake time while adjusting to the mask.
Frequently asked questions
Does mouth taping stop snoring?
Several of the ten studies reported significant changes in snoring index or oxygen desaturation index, but all ten were rated poor quality, so the review does not treat that as proof. A score that moves in a small uncontrolled study says little about whether tape is the reason.
What is the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale?
It is a checklist for judging the quality of non-randomized studies, scoring how participants were selected, how comparable the groups were, and how outcomes were measured. The review’s authors applied it to all ten studies.
How current is the evidence?
The paper was received on October 18, 2024 and accepted on April 13, 2025. Its searches stopped in February 2024, so anything published after early 2024 was never screened.