Yes, you can choke on your own spit while sleeping, usually because your swallowing reflex weakens during deep sleep, allowing saliva to enter the airway, often triggered by issues like acid reflux, postnasal drip, sleep apnea (OSA), or certain medications, causing gasping or coughing as you wake up. While occasional incidents are common, frequent episodes suggest an underlying condition like OSA or GERD, requiring medical attention to prevent serious complications.
The sleep-related swallowing and choking syndrome is described as an occult cause of insomnia with inadequate swallowing during sleep, resulting in aspiration of saliva, coughing, and choking [2]. The condition is intermittently associated with brief arousals or awakenings.
When you swallow, many muscles and nerves work together to move food or drink from your mouth to your stomach. When there's an issue with how these parts work, swallowing may feel uncomfortable or slow. You may cough or choke when you try to swallow water, food or even your own saliva (spit).
If you're alone and choking:
Call 911 or your local emergency number right away. Then, give yourself abdominal thrusts, also called the Heimlich maneuver, to remove the stuck object.
Choking during sleep can be caused by obstructive sleep apnea (when your airway closes temporarily), acid reflux, or postnasal drip. If it happens regularly, a home sleep test can help identify the underlying cause.
Tests to detect obstructive sleep apnea include: Polysomnography. During this sleep study, you're hooked up to equipment that monitors your heart, lung and brain activity and breathing patterns while you sleep. The equipment also measures arm and leg movements and blood oxygen levels.
Falling asleep with a cough drop in your mouth presents a serious choking hazard.
Is waking up choking always sleep apnea? No, while sleep apnea is a common cause, other factors like GERD, allergies, or anxiety may also be responsible.
Symptoms
Hot dogs. This is the #1 choking food we see in our Emergency Department. We would not recommend giving hot dogs to babies or toddlers from a nutritional standpoint, but if you choose to, be sure to cut slices into halves or quarters.
Some lung health issues also cause the body to produce more saliva, making it more difficult to cough or swallow. When this happens, a person can choke on saliva or mucus. Cystic fibrosis, for example, is a genetic condition that can cause thick, sticky saliva and mucus to build up in the lungs and throat.
That's because choking on your own saliva most often occurs when people are talking quickly, laughing, or turning their head — things they do in the company of others. These actions can turn the otherwise simple act of swallowing saliva into inhalation.
Death from choking is more common among the elderly with food most often responsible for such incidents. The use of abdominal thrusts, or the Heimlich Maneuver, is suggested to dislodge objects and prevent suffocation. In the United States, the odds of one dying from choking on food is around 1 in 2,461.
Aspiration pneumonia is a bacterial infection in your lungs. It can happen when you aspirate, or inhale, something other than air into your respiratory tract. This can be food, liquid, saliva, stomach acid, vomit or even a small foreign object.
It is known that the sleep state impairs the cough reflex. Arousal from sleep is required before cough or swallowing will occur in response to upper airway stimuli. We speculate that aspiration occurs passively during sleep as a result of this sleep-induced impairment of mechanical airway defenses.
Choking during sleep may be caused by cardio-respiratory and non-respiratory disorders. 11 patients awoke with the feeling of swallowing a fictive object stuck in their throat, and choking. These non-stereotypic events occurred exclusively upon arousals from N3, without any apnea/hypopnea or epileptic activity.
We often talk about aspiration as something “going down the wrong pipe.” In most situations, it might cause minor irritation while you cough out the wayward food or water. But in some cases, it can cause you to choke, restrict your breathing or cause an infection.
People with apnea often toss and turn and otherwise show signs of restless nighttime sleep. If you find yourself kicking, thrashing, jerking or waking up under a twisted pile of disheveled sheets, apnea might be a possible cause. When you're struggling to breathe at night, your sleep becomes disrupted.
Sleep apnea can occur at any age, but is most common between ages 2 and 8 during the period of peak tonsil growth. Children with sleep apnea typically aren't overweight and are developmentally appropriate, explains Dr. Reddy. However, obesity is a risk factor for sleep apnea in children.
Sinusitis. Because sinusitis causes inflammation throughout the human sinus cavity, this condition can mimic sleep apnea. Both conditions can cause snoring, gasping for air at night, breathing interruptions, and poor sleep quality.
Highlights. Sleep hypopnea is defined as a drop of ≥30% in breathing amplitude and in oxygen saturation >3% (AASMedicine), or >4% (CMMS). This study reveals a systematic bias, with the 3% criterion consistently yielding higher apnea/hypopnea index values.
Choking on saliva occurs when the body's natural swallowing mechanism fails momentarily or doesn't coordinate properly. Exploring why this happens can lead to effective prevention strategies. Swallowing dysfunction: This issue can be linked to neurological conditions, muscular disorders, or the process of aging.
Partial choking occurs when something blocks the airway, but some air still gets through. For example, you start coughing when a small piece of food gets stuck. Complete choking is when the airway is totally blocked, and the person can't breathe at all.
Red flags. Any dysphagia is of concern, but certain findings are more urgent: Symptoms of complete obstruction (eg, drooling, inability to swallow anything) New focal neurologic deficit, particularly any objective weakness.