So, the scientific consensus continues to pile up around snoring and Sleep Apnea, giving more and more weight to the view that you really shouldn’t just ignore your snoring, or your partner’s snoring.
The November’s Journal of the American College of Cardiology brings with it new findings about the risk of nocturnal cardiac arrhythmia in patients who have respiratory problems when during sleep. Particularly, patients were most found to be at risk after elongated pauses in breathing, which is of course the major feature of Sleep Apnea.
I don’t wish to be too alarmist- the results seem to show that there isn’t too high a risk, citing just 1 extra case of arrhythmia per 40,000 respiratory issues. If you’re suffering from Sleep Apnea, don’t worry yourself sick! It is, however, enough of a number to be statistically significant, and has been described by Dr Susan Redline, one of the co-investigators in the study, as suggesting that “people with arrhythmias may have unrecognised or untreated sleep apnea, which may be contributing to their heart rhythm disturbances.”
The study concluded that the chances of a patient developing nocturnal arrhythmia (which can mean such issues such as atrial fibrillation or tachycardia) were increased 18-fold, if respiratory disturbances were present. As part of the conclusions to their study, the authors advised that people need to be tested more frequently for conditions like sleep apnea, especially in cases where the patient is at an increased risk of cardiac illness.
The thing to take from this is that if you are a snorer, or your partner is, you need to treat it as something more than just an irritation or distraction. It’s easy to just write a partner’s snoring off as ‘just one of those things’ but the truth is that in some cases, it really isn’t.
The good thing, of course, is that this is entirely curable. The more we learn about Sleep Apnea, and other respiratory disorders, the more we know how to treat them. Simple aids can be used to correct the problem at source, which leads to a whole lot of benefit for both the sufferer and those around them.
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