If you wake up throughout the night parched and reaching for another drink of water, you're probably also waking up tired and with a sore throat. While many different medications can cause an overall dry mouth, if you're only experiencing a dry mouth while sleeping, you're probably sleeping with your mouth open at some point during the night due to a medical condition.
Nasal Problems
Open-mouth sleeping may be the result of nasal congestion or a deviated septum. If your nose is congested, the tissue inside your nose may be swollen or you may have too much mucus in your nose. Sinusitis, the common cold, the flu and allergies are common causes of nasal congestion. With a deviated septum, your nasal septum is severely shifted from the midline of the nose, making it harder to breathe through your nose.
Sleep Disorder
The sleep disorder obstructive sleep apnea causes you to stop breathing or take shallow breaths in your sleep. This interrupts your sleep for short periods of time, which you may or may not notice. Dry mouth occurs from gasping for air throughout the night, or from sleeping with your mouth open, which is common in sleep apnea patients.
Nasal Symptoms
You generally know when you're stuffed up: You find it hard to breathe through your nose during the day, and you may feel as if you can't clear your nose no matter how many times you blow into that tissue. You can have a stuffy nose with or without a runny nose.
Deviated septum symptoms differ from person to person but include nasal congestion, frequent nosebleeds and sinus infections, noisy breathing during sleep and occasional facial pain, headaches and postnasal drip, cites the American Academy of Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery.
Sleep Apnea Symptoms
Snoring is one of the telltale signs of sleep apnea, according to Stanford Sleep and Dreams, a leader in sleep research. You may wake up throughout the night struggling for air, or you may not even notice waking up at all throughout the night. However, if you have sleep apnea, you probably wake up feeling tired and that sleepiness continues throughout your day.
Diagnosis
Your primary care doctor can diagnose nasal congestion and a deviated septum through your symptoms and a physical examination. However, your doctor may send you to an ear, nose and throat specialist if you suffer from chronic sinus problems or if he thinks you may benefit from a surgical procedure.
To diagnose sleep apnea, your doctor will send you for an overnight, polysomnography sleep study, which measures your eye movements, muscle movements, brain activity and breathing. The minimum diagnosis for sleep apnea is five apnea episodes per hour, which can be absences of breathing or shallow breaths, cites Stanford Sleep and Dreams.
Treatment
Over-the-counter decongestants and antihistamines can treat nasal congestion. You can also sleep with a humidifier, which adds moisture to the air. Adhesive nasal strips can help open your nasal passages, but these strips do not treat sleep apnea, warns MayoClinic.com. An ENT doctor can determine if you need septoplasty, a surgical procedure performed entirely through the nostrils, to fix a deviated septum. For sleep apnea, a sleep specialist first prescribes a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine and mask, which provide the right amount of pressure to keep your airways open while you sleep. In cases where CPAP treatment doesn't work, surgery is often the next course.
