Monday, March 1, 2010

How To Prevent Snoring (part 2)

How To Prevent Snoring (part 2)

As we have mentioned earlier, simple measures can contribute largely to the treatment of the condition. Stop snoring aids, on the other hand, would require patience to find what fits for you.

The market offers a great variety of snoring aids including nasal breathing devices, adjustable beds, oral and dental appliances and pressurized masks.

Nasal breathing devices normally aim to keep your nasal passages open or your jaws from dropping. You may find nasal strips, nasal clips, chin up strips and chin straps under this category. These products normally require you to breathe using your nose rather than your mouth since mouth breathing typically ends up to snoring. It has been observed that a switch from mouth to nasal breathing can eliminate a number of snoring types.

Mouth pieces or oral devices aim to position the tongue away from blocking the air passage. You should seek dental specialist if you are considering the use of such devices as solutions to nighttime dilemma.

Surgery, on the other hand, is an irreversible decision. Therefore, you should be careful if you truly are considering this option. Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty or UPPP is known to be the traditional method of trimming excess tissues in the throat. A more modern approach uses laser thus the name Laser-Assisted Uvulopalatoplasty or LAUP.

Removal of unnecessary tissues in the throat enlarges the air passage which helps reduce the collapse of the muscles.

Remember, surgery is the last resort and prevention is the best medicine.

Sleep well,
Greg

Saturday, February 27, 2010

How To Prevent Snoring

How To Prevent Snoring

The most often question raised to any condition is - can it be cured? Well, that actually depends on the nature of the disease, disorder, or syndrome and what knowledge do the medical and scientific communities have with regards to the problem.

Luckily, snoring is not much of a difficult condition to treat. The nature of which is also well-known that most consider it normal. So normal that many tend not to get bothered of its effects, especially when mild.

Treatments for snoring depend on the diagnosis gathered. While snoring may appear to have no types, it must be understood that there are certain kinds of snoring that excessively disrupts sleep and there are those that do not cause any harm at all.

Examination of the physiology and anatomy of the throat and the underlying tissues will reveal where the problems root. Usually, snoring stems from loose muscles that flaps back and forth when air runs through the throat. However, this is not always the case.

Sometimes, snoring can also be due to allergies, deformities, infections and abnormal enlargement of adenoids and tonsils. All of which, if carefully examined, will lead us back to the obstruction of air passage.

Normally, prevention of the main causes can treat snoring. This includes abstinence from smoking, drinking alcohol and other relaxants, and maintenance of an ideal weight. All these have adverse effects not only on the body but can directly cause loose muscles to vibrate abnormally.

Treatments to stop snoring can include lifestyle-changing habits, use of stop snoring aids and more intensive surgeries. The choice is normally set for the snorer to take, depending on the aggravation of the condition.

Approaches to be used with your condition vary according to your personal preference and the immediate need to cure your condition. It is best to seek medical help first or get yourself educated with your options before running under the knife or strapping your mouth with some device.

Sleep well,
Greg

Friday, February 26, 2010

Snoring Severity

Snoring Severity
There are various contributors on the severity of snoring. These include:

Mouth anatomy
Snoring usually concerns the tissues involved in breathing. There are a couple of reasons why the air passage is narrow, which is itself, a good contributor to problem snoring. This may be due to enlarged tonsils, elongated soft palate and thick soft palate, and abnormality in the tissues at the back of the throat. These can all cause obstruction in the air passage.

Alcohol consumption
Any factor that can help relax the muscles of the throat more are effective causes of snoring. Due to the fact that alcohol is a sedative substance, it acts upon the muscles in the throat as a relaxant. Thus, regular intake of alcohol during near bedtime can cause disruptive snoring.

Sleep apnea
More often than not, snoring is associated with obstructive sleep apnea. It is best that you are well diagnosed so that due treatment can be processed.

Nasal problems
It may also be that biological factors can intrude to the normal passage of air in your throat. The underlying part of the nose, termed to as the bridge is the nasal septum. When this partition is quite crooked or there is any nasal congestion due to this, snoring would occur.

Sleep well,
Greg

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Snoring

Snoring

There is over 300 anti snoring devices invented since the first innovative tennis-ball-in-a-sock which by the way primarily helps prevent patients from sleeping on their backs. Other devices however, initiate unpleasant stimuli everytime a person snores.

However, it must be noted that snoring is not subjected to our voluntary faculties. If one device really does stop you from snoring, then it might be credited to the fact that you were kept awake all night…without one sweet dream.

It all lies in the abnormality of the air passage. Free flow of air is needed to facilitate regular breathing. With problem snoring, it is likely that any part of the area at the back of the mouth and the nose strike constantly. Thus, the vibration in breathing.

It may be that some people consider snoring as a non-serious condition but in fact, the opposite is true.

People who suffer from snoring normally have disrupted sleep that deprives them of having normal and comfortable sleep. And when the condition gets aggravated, the snorer normally will have long-term health problems including obstructive sleep apnea. And besides, this actually causes patients embarrassment and oftentimes affects another person's sleep.

Obstructive sleep apnea, on the other hand, is the condition by which snoring is constantly interrupted with total obstruction of breathing. This occurs at an average of ten seconds long and may happen at around 7 times in an hour. Thus, the patient may suffer from 30 episodes up to 300 episodes in one night alone.

Such episodes will reduce the level of oxygen in the blood, which drives the heart to pump harder.

Immediate effects include a forced light sleep so that he may keep his muscles in tensed state. This will help facilitate a regular flow of air in the lungs. This then results to unrelaxed rest. Thus, throughout the day he will become sleepy which causes him not to function well. This then will contribute largely to the enlargement of the heart and raised blood pressure.
If you are a sufferer from snoring, it is best that you get early diagnosis. While it may not be a life-threatening condition, it is still very likely that your condition gets severe.

Sleep well,
Greg

Friday, January 29, 2010

Causes of Snoring

Causes of Snoring

So what truly cause snoring. This may be quite a hard-to-answer question when were talking of only one cause. For in fact, there are many basic contributors that all funnel into the greater source of the problem.

Medically, snoring is defined as a noise caused by vibration from the airways of the respiratory tract that only appears during sleep.

The big question here is that, why, of all states, do we only experience snoring during restful moments?

Well, while we breathe 24/7, the likelihood that one snores during waking hours is very slim. This is due to the factor that only relaxed muscles can result in snoring.

During sleep, all our voluntary muscles are relaxed. The throat, in the same way as the triceps are relaxed is also resting while we sleep. The fact that tissues in the throat are soft, adds to the eventual output of vibrating sounds.

Once this tissue eases out, the passage of air will turn into a narrower passage. As you can see, narrowed passages cause louder noise because there is more contact for friction, thus the vibration.

These same factors also point to the reasons why there are differences in the loudness, pitch and tone of snores.

The loudness of snore is affected by the force of the wind that comes through the air passages. Therefore, when the speed of wind is faster, the snore, in general, is louder and more resonant. This answers why babies are capable of snoring too. However, theirs is not typically considered as snoring but only as mild noises created by the respiratory tract. This must never be ignored though since it may be the early sign that something is jammed in your child's airway.

But while it may appear to both genders at any age, men are more often affected by this condition than women and middle-aged men are most likely to be the victims.

This is due to the reason that men have more fleshy necks since theirs are a bit wider than women's. This factor combined with the speed of air, the result is most likely to be snoring.

Meanwhile, women by nature produce progesterone hormones. This is known to inhibit snoring, thus they are less susceptible towards the irritable sounds. Because this actual hormone helps in relieving a person from this nighttime dilemma, some anti-snoring remedies are known to use progesterone as their basic ingredient.

Lifestyle and health factors are also thought of as culprits of snoring. These include:

  • Allergies that cause clogs in the air paths.
  • Drying of the nasal cavities due to several elements including allergy medications.
  • Cold and flu, this explains why some people only experience snoring when they are sick.
  • Excessive intake of alcohol.
  • Thickening of the tissues along the nasal passage. Often, surgeries done on conditions not directly related to snoring can also contribute to the frequency and intensity of the snores.
  • Abnormally large belly or guts.
  • Irritation of the air passages due to overuse of nasal sprays.
  • Abnormal enlargement of the tonsils or the adenoids.
  • Smoking which causes inflammation in the air passages.
  • Swelling of the thyroid gland or goiter.
  • Blockage of the airflow due to large tongue.
  • Medications that initiate relaxation
  • Obesity
  • Inefficient neural control on the nasal membranes.

Sleep well,
Greg