Some people fall into the habit of sleeping with their mouths open … it’s rarely a conscious choice. Open-mouth sleeping allows your jaw to relax and drop open too far. This stretches the skin, tissue and muscles in the throat or mouth beyond normal ranges for several hours each night. Over time, the muscles and tissue get weaker and looser, making the possibility of developing a sleep-time airway obstruction more likely. And you wind up snoring.
Most commonly found in people older than 50, chronic snoring is often associated with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), and disturbs the snorer’s sleep. People with OSA stop breathing literally hundreds of times each night, for anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes at a time.
The obesity epidemic is also contributing to the increase in the number of chronic snorers. Extra layers of at around the neck put pressure on the airways, making it harder to take air in when the overweight person is asleep and throat and jaw muscles are more relaxed and weighted down.
Other health problems like high blood pressure, arthritis, smoking or even pneumonia may contribute to snoring, especially for the elderly. Yet anyone of any age who has these health issues combined with obesity is at high risk of having OSA.
OSA increases your risk of heart attack, arterial damage, stroke and other potentially fatal diseases.
Left untreated, sleep apnea can be fatal, especially for the elderly or small children.
If you are a chronic snorer who awakens each morning feeling disoriented, ill or as if you hadn’t slept at all the night before, you may have sleep apnea. You need to act now to stave off potentially serious medical problems.
Break the snoring cycle and you’ve mastered your OSA. Stop night-time breathing disruptions and you may be able to significantly reduce your risk of many life-threatening diseases.
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Why Snoring Is Killing You? & What You Can Do Affordably To Save Yourself!
Snoring In Children Impacts Cardiovascular Function
ScienceDaily (Jun. 12, 2008) — Primary snoring in children may have an impact on cardiovascular functioning equivalent to that of moderate obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), according to a research abstract that will be presented June 11 at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
The study, authored by Angela Jackman and colleagues at the University of Melbourne and Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, focused on 40 children who were referred for clinical assessment of a sleep-related breathing disorder and matched controls. Overnight polysomnography was performed, and heart rate and heart rate variability data from the total sleep period and from periods of uninterrupted sleep were analyzed.
The subjects were grouped by clinical diagnosis: primary snoring, mild OSA, moderate OSA, severe OSA, and controls.
According to the results, significant overall differences were found in heart rate over the total sleep period and during stable sleep, whereby heart rate was highest in severe OSA, followed by primary snoring, moderate OSA, mild OSA, and controls. In time domain analyses, heart rate variability was significantly lower in primary snoring than in controls.
"Primary snoring in children has traditionally been considered benign, in part because some children grow out of the condition without intervention," said Jackman. "Mounting evidence now suggests, however, that this condition can impact cognition, behavior, and academic performance.
Furthermore, our current preliminary findings concur with emerging evidence that primary snoring in children may also impact heart function. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to compare the effects of varying severities of sleep-related breathing disorders on cardiovascular control and to suggest that children with primary snoring may be just as affected as children with more severe sleep-related breathing disorders (such as obstructive sleep apnea syndrome).
The long-term consequences of such changes are currently unknown, and further research is necessary to expand on these findings."
Snoring is a sound made in the upper airway of your throat as you sleep. It normally occurs as you breathe in air. It is a sign that your airway is being partially blocked. About one-half of people who snore loudly have OSA. OSA happens when the tissue in the back of the throat collapses to block the entire airway.
This keeps air from getting in to the lungs. Almost everyone is likely to snore at one time or another. It has been found in all age groups. Estimates of snoring vary widely based on how it is defined. The rate of snoring in children is reported to be 10 to 12 percent.
It is recommended that infants (three to 11 months) get 14 to 15 hours of nightly sleep, while toddlers get 12 to 14 hours, children in pre-school 11-13 hours and school-aged children between 10-11 hours.
