Bibliometric Analysis of the Effect of Orofacial Myofunctional Training on Postoperative Mouth Breathing in Children with OSA

Abstract

Objective: To conduct a bibliometric and visualized analysis on studies related to the application of orofacial myofunctional therapy (OMT) in the context of improving habitual mouth breathing after adenotonsillectomy in children with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). This analysis will be done using the BERTopic method. Methods: From the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, we searched for relevant articles. These articles were used as the study objects. The Sentence-BERT model was employed for text encoding, and then dimensionality reduction was done using UMAP, and clustering was done with HDBSCAN. Topic keywords were extracted via class-based term frequency-inverse document frequency (c-TF-IDF). Then, thematic structure was analyzed with intertopic distance maps, similarity heatmaps, document distribution maps, and hierarchical clustering maps. BERTopic is a topic modeling technique that employs transformer embeddings and c-TF-IDF to derive interpretable topics from text data. Results: The related studies mainly have two research lines. The first was a diagnostic and therapeutic line focusing on sleep-disordered breathing, perioperative management, and minimally invasive techniques. The second one was a functional rehabilitation line focused on OMT, orofacial functional assessment, and morphological and functional improvement. Current studies mainly focus on adenotonsillectomy and technical optimization, but OMT is an adjunctive intervention, which has a certain research basis for improving postoperative mouth breathing, sleep quality, and orofacial function in children with OSA. Conclusion: OMT holds potential clinical value as an essential adjunctive approach for enhancing postoperative habitual mouth breathing and promoting orofacial functional reconstruction. Future studies need to further evaluate its long-term efficacy and standardized application to promote an integrated diagnostic and therapeutic model of “surgical treatment plus functional rehabilitation”.