Disorders and snoring
I’m sure you’ve already heard somebody snore or even just know what the word means. Snoring may be something very familiar to us, as you may have discovered your bed partner, parents, and grandparents, even Uncle Ned or Aunt Sophie caterwauling at incredibly rhythmical sound levels at night.
While some of you can just laugh and make jokes about it, snoring can however be a symptom of a serious disorder called obstructive sleep apnea - just one of the many sleeping disorders that pose threat to every individual. Among the more common sleep disorders are insomnia, sleep apnea (characterized by loud snoring), narcolepsy, and fibromyalgia.
- Insomnia, unlike the popular misconception, is not defined by the number of hours of sleep a person gets or how long it takes to fall asleep since individuals vary normally in their need for and satisfaction with sleep. What insomnia means is the difficulty of an individual to initiate or maintain sleep. This may likely causes problems during the day such as tiredness, lack of energy, difficulty concentrating, and most apparently, irritability.
- Sleep Apnea as characterized mostly by loud, constant snoring is a potentially life-threatening disorder. A person having sleep apnea stops breathing repeatedly during sleep, somewhere from ten seconds to up to three minutes.
- Narcolepsy is associated with excessive and overwhelming daytime sleepiness even with adequate nighttime sleep. Commonly a person with this kind of disorder is likely to become drowsy or to fall asleep easily, often incredibly at inappropriate times and places.
- Fibromyalgia, unlike the other sleeping disorders, is a type of chronic pain illness characterized by extensive musculoskeletal aches, soft tissue tenderness, pain and stiffness, general fatigue and sleep disturbances. Patients experiencing this kind of disorder go through a variety of symptoms of varying intensities, meaning, the symptoms increase and decrease over time.
Obviously, the most common and the most often talked about symptom is “snoring.” It is a common condition that affects all people at any age, albeit it occurs more frequently in men and overweight people. Further, it is an indicator of a possible obstructive sleep apnea while there are cases where it is just primary snoring.
Snoring happens when the flow of air through the mouth and nose is physically obstructed producing a noise an individual breathes during sleep which in turn causes vibration of the soft palate and uvula. Apnea actually means the ‘abscence of breathing.’ The obstruction may be due to a combination of factors that are not limited to obstructed nasal airways, poor muscle tone in the throat and tongue, bulky throat tissue in the case of overweight people, and long soft palate and/or uvula.
Habitual snorers may run the risk for serious health problems as obstructive sleep apnea is often associated with chronic snorers. This creates several problems including the following:
- Longer interruptions of breathing (usually more than ten seconds) during sleep that is caused by partial or sometimes total obstruction or blockage of the airway. In some serious cases, it can have total blockage episodes of a hundred times per night.
- Waking up during sleep frequently without realizing the situation.
- The need to just sleep lightly to make their throat muscles tense enough to maintain airflow.
- Lowered blood oxygen levels causing the heart to pump harder and blood pressure to consequently rise resulting to a poor night's sleep which eventually leads to lethargy in the daytime which somehow influences the routine. Moreover, prolonged suffering from this disorder will yield to higher blood pressure and enlargement of the heart.
The effective treatment for loud annoying snoring may be surgery and other pseudo-surgical methods however the following can also be effective in preventing the snore again:
- Begin losing weight and improving your eating habits.
- Avoiding tranquilizers such as sleeping pills and antihistamines before going to bed.
- Avoiding alcohol, heavy meals, and snacks roughly four hours before you sleep.
- Trying to establish you regular sleeping patterns.
- Trying to sleep on your side rather than on your back.
- Tilting the head of your bed up at approximately four inches.
©Copyrighted by Good Health Medicine All Rights Reserved 2006 |
