What is snoring?
Snoring is caused by the lining of the throat blocking the trachea and lungs, causing the brain to lack oxygen. The brain then sends out a signal to dilate the throat and windpipe with the aim of returning air to normal. However, if these disorders occur regularly, it will affect your sleep.
If you regularly snore at night, it can decrease the quality of your sleep, leading to daytime fatigue, irritability and increased health problems.
Causes of snoring while sleeping and how to fix it:
Since everyone snores for different reasons, it’s important for you to find out the reason behind your snoring and then have a remedy. Common causes of snoring include:
- Age: As we enter middle age, the throat becomes narrower and the muscle tone in the throat decreases. While we can’t stop our bodies from aging, we can make lifestyle changes, change bedtime habits, and do some throat exercises that can prevent snoring.
- Being overweight: Fat tissue and poor muscle tone contribute to snoring. You can do exercises and try to lose weight to limit or stop snoring.
- Gender: Men have narrower airways than women and are more prone to snoring.
- Genetics: Narrow throat, cleft palate, enlarged thyroid and other physical characteristics that contribute to snoring are often genetic.
- Nose and sinus problems: Congested or blocked airways make breathing difficult and create space in the throat, leading to snoring.
- Alcohol, smoking and drugs: Drinking, smoking, and using certain medications, such as tranquilizers such as lorazepam (Ativan) and diazepam (Valium), can increase muscle relaxation leading to more snoring. When you stop to use these drugs, everything will get better.
- Sleeping position: Sleeping on your back causes the flesh in the throat to relax and block the airway. In this case, you can change your sleeping position.
- More serious causes: Snoring can be a sign of sleep apnea, a serious sleep disorder that disrupts your breathing several times during the night, affecting sleep quality. So if you’re tired and sleepy a lot during the day, it could be a sign of sleep apnea or another breathing problem related to nighttime sleep. To identify this syndrome, you should keep a sleep diary (using a sleep tracking device or app). If you sleep alone, set up a camera to monitor your sleep at night and seek for help from a sleep specialist.
Treatment of severe snoring:
- Give the patient oxygen or mechanical ventilation with continuous positive pressure: This method works almost 100% but is inconvenient when the patient is on the road or in a shelter.
- Intra-oral appliance: includes a fitted denture that elevates the jaw, tongue, and palate to keep air through. In this case you should consult a specialist to make sure you are suitable with this device and that your health condition does not deteriorate.
- Throat expansion surgery: pricking the throat or the base of the tongue, cutting the tonsils, cutting the excess tissue in the throat to increase the airway circulation. This method often causes pain for the patient and slow healing of the incision.
- Laser surgery: this method can overcome the above disadvantages of traditional surgery, but you need to do it many times to get rid of snoring completely.
- Radiofrequency ablation: uses low-intensity radio waves to shrink tissue in the roof of the mouth and help reduce snoring. This method is less painful than other types of surgery.