Snoring is often dismissed as a mere nuisance, but people don’t often realize that it actually has a huge impact on one’s health.
How does snoring affect your health? Snoring can disrupt your sleep even without you knowing it. The lack of sleep can lead to drowsiness and can weaken your immune system. The frequent interruptions in your sleeping can also eventually lead to more serious health concerns like heart disease, stroke, or diabetes.
Read more to better understand what kind of impact snoring may have on your health and why. You’ll also get some tips on how you can prevent snoring right from your very home.
Health Risks Associated With Snoring
Here are just some of the potential health risks that a snorer is exposed to:
Heart Disease
People who snore are more prone to heart disease and other related conditions like hypertension and arrhythmia. To give you a better picture of how and why this happens, let’s first look at what happens when you snore.
When you snore, there’s a chance for your breathing to stop every so often. Your breathing may also slow down as air tries to force its way through your airways (because snoring is caused by obstructions in your nasal or throat passages).
This is also why most snorers are diagnosed with arrhythmia, which is characterized by an irregular heart rhythm.
The irregular breathing will cause your blood oxygen levels to dip extremely low, which sends an alert signal to your brain. Your brain will then try to wake you up, forcing your heart to beat faster to deliver more blood and oxygen.
Now, imagine this happening a few times each night.
The frequent slowing down and speeding up lays a lot of stress on your heart, which makes it more likely to fail earlier than expected.
Stroke
We mentioned earlier that the frequent stopping and slowing down in breathing causes your blood oxygen level to drop. This means that your brain may receive less oxygen than required, making the risk of a stroke much higher.
Sleep studies also show that snorers are more likely to have carotid atherosclerosis, which means that their arteries become narrower because of plaque deposits. Plaque is made up of fats, cholesterol, and other substances.
When plaque builds up and the blood vessels become clogged, the blood wouldn’t know where to go, making it seep through brain tissue. This is what prompts a stroke to happen.
Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD)
There is a right rhythm and timing to how your sphincter at the lower end of your esophagus relaxes and tenses to keep the contents of your stomach down. But when your sphincter relaxes at the wrong time, a suction reaction is triggered, causing your stomach acids to go up instead of stay down.
This is what happens when you have GERD.
Now, this is how snoring contributes to that.
When you have a snoring problem, you also have an irregular breathing pattern. This is what prompts your sphincter to relax at the wrong time.
GERD is also one of the main causes of heartburn. So if you are a snorer and often experience heartburn, then you should know that these are all associated.
Nocturia
Nocturia is a condition where you wake up a few times each night just to urinate. This is different from bed-wetting or enuresis where the person does not wake up and proceeds to empty the bladder while asleep.
A lot of things can go wrong in the body when a person snores. Normally, a person does not really produce a lot of urine while asleep. But as your blood oxygen levels decrease, your brain sends a jolt of hormones into your body to wake you up, which may sometimes result in mixed messages. Your body may feel the need to release fluids, even if there is no need for it.
The frequent rousing from sleep to urinate also affects the quality of sleep, which means that you will most likely feel drowsy the next day despite being in bed for 6 to 8 hours.
