I wanted to talk to you about how you can avoid snoring problems. I believe there is one main characteristic that explains why no one ever seems to try and fix this problem. The characteristic is that people that snore aren’t the victims of it. Think about it for a second. When you’re producing these sounds, you’re asleep. You don’t actually hear them. It is the people around you that you’re driving crazy and keeping up throughout the night. I think for the very reason that since you’re not really a victim of the problem, you have absolutely no incentive to fix it. I’m going to show you how to avoid snoring problems in the easiest way, so you’ll actually follow through.

The reason that you make sounds when you sleep is that your muscles go to sleep. When your muscles to go to sleep, it causes things to move. One thing that happens is that your tongue falls back into your throat. Another thing that happens is that your jaw tends to open up too. This creates a very narrow point in the throat area and that causes a lot of vibration (hence sound). This is what leads to the problem.

If you want to avoid snoring problems then you need to control the variables. You obviously can’t control the position of your tongue, but you can control the position of your jaw. What you can use is a jaw supporter to hold your jaw up. This takes pressure off the throat and stops you from making sounds.

Mouth breathing drastically reduces body oxygenation: the amount of freely available oxygen in tissues is usually reduced almost two times when the person starts to breathe through the mouth, for example, during sleep. Epidemiological studies clearly proved that deaths from heart attacks, asthma, COPD, epilepsy, complications of diabetes, and many other chronic conditions most likely occur during early morning hours (from about 4 to 7 am). Clinical experience suggests that mouth breathing is the leading factor of these deaths. Apart from mortality statistic, symptoms of many conditions get much worse in the early morning. How to prevent negative effects of acute tissue hypoxia, that is the driving force for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and dozens of other diseases?

In order to ensure nasal breathing during the night, in the 1960s Russian patients, practicing the Buteyko self-oxygenation breathing method, taught by MDs, invented mouth taping. First of all, it is necessary to find out, if one has this problem, by checking dryness in the mouth just after waking up in the morning. If the mouth is dry, the person had mouth breathing. It could begin when the person went to sleep or it could appear at 3 or 4 am. In any case, just 20-30 minutes of mouth-breathing resets the breathing centre, and such patients, as a ruler, have less than 20 s of oxygen in the body in the morning. (Oxygen content is found by measuring stress-free breath-holding time after usual exhalation: exhale normally and hold your breath, counting seconds using a watch, but only until initial signs of discomfort.)

For mouth taping one needs a surgical tape and cream to prevent the tape sticking. Both can be bought in the pharmacy. Micropore (or 3M) and Vaseline are popular choices. There is no need to use a very wide tape, 1 or 1.5 cm is sufficient. First, put a small amount of cream on the lips so that it is easy to remove the tape in the morning (some, but not many tapes, can be very sticky). Then take a small piece of tape, about 4-5 cm (or almost 2 inches) long, and stick it vertically, starting just under the nose and going across the closed mouth down to the chin. Some students prefer to put a wider it along or horizontally, but a short piece in the middle is sufficient. If you are afraid to “seal” your mouth completely, tape only one half (or one side) of the mouth leaving space for emergency breathing.

Taping one’s mouth at night normally should be a temporary measure. When the body oxygenation is above 20-25 s in the morning, mouth taping is not necessary.

After some hours of sleep, very few people may find mouth taping is uncomfortable. But this happens only in cases, when parameters of sleep are not suitable for the human organism, for example, the blanket can be too warm, room temperature too high, air quality poor, etc. Sleeping on one’s back is another factor that also intensifies breathing and drastically reduces body oxygenation creating discomfort, if the mouth is taped. My other articles explain the method “How to prevent sleeping on one’s back”, data regarding highest mortality rates and various complications during early morning hours.

Stroke patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) who undergo treatment with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) following their stroke may substantially reduce their risk of death, according to Spanish research to be published in the July 1 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

“Our results suggest that patients with ischemic stroke and moderate to severe OSA showed an increased mortality risk,” wrote lead author, Miguel Angel Martínez-García, M.D., of Requena General Hospital in Valencia, Spain. “CPAP treatment, although tolerated by only a small percentage of patients, is associated with a reduction in this excess risk and achieves a mortality [rate] similar to patients without OSA or with mild disease.”

The study identified and recruited 166 consecutive patients from Requena General Hospital who had had an ischemic stroke and subsequently were diagnosed with sleep apnea in sleep study tests. The mean age was 73.3. CPAP treatment was offered to the 96 patients who scored above 20 on the apnea-hypopnea index, indicating moderate-to-severe OSA. Each patient was followed for five years, reporting to the outpatient clinic and one, three and six months, then at six month intervals until the conclusion of the study. They were evaluated for general status, new cardiovascular events, CPAP adherence and death.

At the conclusion of the five year follow-up period, nearly half (48.8 percent) the original study group had died and only 28 of the original 96 were considered to be fully compliant with CPAP treatment. After adjusting for 13 potentially confounding variables, including age, gender, co-morbidities and current smoking, the researchers found that those with moderate to severe OSA who had not complied with CPAP treatment had nearly 1.6 times the risk of death compared to patients who tolerated CPAP, whereas those with moderate-to-severe disease who had tolerated CPAP had similar risk of death than patients without sleep apnea or mild disease.

“Our results suggest that moderate to severe OSA in patients with stroke has an unfavorable effect on long-term mortality. CPAP treatment is associated with a reduction in this excess risk,” concluded Dr. Martínez-García in the article.

However, while the researchers controlled for the measurable variables they anticipated as potentially contributing to the link between CPAP compliance and risk of death following stroke, they acknowledge that certain variables were impossible to adequately anticipate or measure. “Patients who did not tolerate CPAP might have a special profile; [they] may have poor adherence to other types of treatment, including treatment of cardiovascular prevention, which would carry with it a higher risk of stroke,” said Dr. Martínez-García. “However, the variables that measure the adherence of all the treatments in these patients are very difficult to analyze because patients often take many medications. This is a limitation of our study.”

Further research in the form of a long-term, multi-center study with enough statistical power to verify the effect of CPAP on mortality in these patients is necessary before drawing any direct causal link between CPAP treatment and risk of death after stroke, said Dr. Martínez-García.

Other important goals should be immediately improving CPAP compliance within the elderly stroke population, he suggested. “One of the most important objectives is to increase CPAP adherence to treatment in stroke patients. This is a very difficult objective because of the special characteristics of stroke patients, who tend to be elderly, may have neurological damages, and whose symptoms related to sleep apnea are less likely to rapidly improve with CPAP,” said Dr. Martínez-García. “Spending time to explain the benefits of treatment in terms of cardiovascular prognosis, being in direct contact with them, educational programs, offering them the possibility of sleep lab assessments if they have problems with CPAP treatment and improvements in the comfort of the devices would be the activities could do to improve the adherence to CPAP treatment.”

Source: American Thoracic Society