15-month old grinding teeth - worms?

[Umnitsa]

DD has been grinding her teeth and someone suggested it could be worms!!

I thought she was just getting used to having all this new equipment in her mouth, and apparently I grind teeth as well, so I never gave it a second thought.

We have no pets and she does not play in the sand outside, but she does put everything in her mouth.

Is there a way to check whether indeed she has pinworms, or I should go ahead and give her a dewormer regardless?

Worms ? Never heard that link before ????? My DS has always been a grinder...think it's just one of those things. I wouldn't medicate for worms unless you know she has them.

Why would worms cause teeth grinding?

Was this person old?

Or weird ?

Thank you, I feel better about it.

It was delicately suggested by our lovely nanny. I then googled baby tooth grinding and apparently on some occasions it can indeed be a sign of pinworms.

There are a few references on the internet, but nothing especially authoritative, IMO.

A search of pubmed, here finds only 2 results, a bulgarian paper from 1971, and a russian paper from 1987, though without abstracts.

Slightly more on google scholar here, but again not much, and no plausible explanation of why. The main reason fr the google results seems to be that a researcher working in the field of bruxism has the surname 'Worms'.

Its not to say that it could never happen that a tooth grinding child has worms, but I would expect that if there was a recognised link I think there would be more about it in the literature, and also that someone would have made some effort to suggest why.

If you did want to try to see if there are worms, they will tend to come out at night time, so looking for them then might help, some people also suggest using sellotape to catch them, though with a non-toilet trained baby I think that would be risky!
Some information on diagnosis here: www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Threadworms/Pages/Diagnosis.aspx

Wow, thank you, Catsareevil, I really appreciate your reviewing existing research on it. I have seen the NHS page with symptoms but, as you say, checking her nappy during sleep will be quite an undertaking, and I have not seen anything in her stool. Anyway, in a way it is reassuring that the connection has not been explored in more detail - given how common worms are, one would expect that every symptom is studied to death, so this may be just an urban myth.

Disclosure: both the nanny and I are Russian, so the bruxism-worms link does not sound so far-fetched, it is one of these things "everyone" seems to know, and has some 'proven' remedies for. The nanny suggested putting a clover of peeled garlic in DD's nappy as it will allegedly get the worm out...