Snoring can be dangerous for the snoring person! Why? The reason that comes to mind first is the anger of others. Threats of physical violence are a fairly common occurrence, and the unceremonious elbowing of a sleeping “snorer” is all the more so. And sometimes snoring even becomes the cause of murder! In the century before last, the famous shooter in the West, John Wesley Hardin, was so furious with a snoring coming from a nearby hotel room that he grabbed a gun and shot the culprit through the wall. In Dallas in the 1980s, police arrested a woman who had hidden a gun in her bed to shoot a loudly snoring roommate. And today, and in our country, physical reprisal against snoring is far from uncommon.                

Snoring has another danger – complications. There is such a condition as obstructive sleep apnea syndrome , or sleep apnea disease. Periodic interruptions in breathing, which can be observed in a sleeping person up to hundreds of times per night, lead to an overload of the cardiovascular system and can provoke, accelerate the development of heart disease, increase the risk of arrhythmias, heart attacks, and strokes.   

Watch a video that shows the mechanism of occurrence and the possible consequences of the disease.

Acute lack of oxygen during apnea leads to a stress reaction, accompanied by activation of the nervous and endocrine systems and an increase in blood pressure. Persistent arterial hypertension is observed in 40-50% of patients with apnea, and its severity depends on the severity of breathing disorders during sleep. In contrast to healthy individuals, apnea patients have higher pressure in the morning than in the evening.         

The most common heart rhythm disturbances in apnea are sinus arrhythmia, pacemaker migration, atrial and ventricular premature beats, heart block. A characteristic feature of such arrhythmias is their high frequency at night (especially during periods of pauses in breathing) and complete or almost complete absence during the day.   

In recent years, the results of a number of large prospective studies have been published that clearly show an increase in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in patients with untreated apnea. The risk of death from myocardial infarction or stroke increases 3 times compared to healthy volunteers and patients with uncomplicated snoring. 

Watch an interview with a patient with obstructive sleep apnea who had several myocardial infarctions before visiting our sleep center.

There is only one conclusion: Sleep apnea needs to be treated! And this must be done with the help of a specialist who will assess the severity of breathing disorders during sleep and prescribe the correct effective treatment . Sleep apnea is usually treated with CPAP therapy , a technique that has a positive effect from the first night of use.   

At present, the improved CPAP devices Prisma Line from the new line of the Weinmann company, Germany, have been developed . Their use allows the most effective and comfortable treatment of the entire spectrum of respiratory disorders in patients with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome.