Snoring has become "the source of chronic disease"

Why do people snore

Snoring is a very common phenomenon. In the traditional concept, snoring was once considered to be "satisfying and sleeping" and living a happy life. In fact, people snoring because of the narrowness of the airway, nasal cavity, or pharyngeal cavity. As the person exhales and inhales, the airflow rushes through the narrowed area, vibrates the mucous membrane, and snoring sounds.

During night sleep, nerve excitability decreases, muscles relax, upper airway mucosa collapses, and local stenosis is formed. When airflow passes through the stenosis, there will be snoring, and in severe cases, partial blockage will be formed, and breathing will stop temporarily.

Snoring is completely uncontrollable. Some people never snore, while some people snore constantly all night. Snoring not only affects the sleep of people around you, but also poses a serious threat to your own health.

More than just making "noise"

Now more and more studies have found that snoring is the "source disease" of various chronic diseases.

Severe snoring, we can also call it "malignant snoring", can cause repeated upper airway blockage during sleep, intermittent breathing airflow, affect oxygen exchange, and cause a decrease in blood oxygen saturation. It is clinically called obstructive sleep breathing Pause syndrome. The disease can increase the prevalence of chronic diseases such as hypertension, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes, senile dementia, respiratory diseases, and childhood growth and development disorders on the basis of causing metabolic disorders.

Patients frequently suffer from apneas or hypoventilation, and the oxygen content in the blood decreases, causing frequent awakenings during sleep, thereby destroying the sleep structure. Patients will have a series of clinical symptoms such as obvious daytime sleepiness, mood swings, and memory loss.

Snoring is also divided into good and evil

Many people snoring only happens occasionally, such as when they are tired, after drinking alcohol, or when there is a problem with their sleeping posture. Snoring that only occurs under certain circumstances generally does not cause damage to important organs such as the heart, brain, and kidneys. We can call it "benign snoring" for the time being. If the snoring further develops and becomes constant snoring throughout the night, or even apnea, then it becomes a "malignant snoring".

The so-called "malignant snoring" refers to long-term holding of breath and snoring during sleep, accompanied by irreversible damage to important organs such as heart, brain and kidney. Once it develops into a "malignant snoring", we must pay enough attention. If it cannot be treated in time, if it exists for a long time, it will cause irreversible damage to our health.

Children's snoring should also arouse the attention of parents. Children's snoring is mostly caused by tonsil hypertrophy and adenoid hyperplasia. Hyperplastic tonsils and adenoids can block the child's nasal cavity or upper respiratory tract, causing nasal congestion, sinusitis, mouth breathing, sleep snoring and other symptoms. Long-term poor breathing and cerebral hypoxia and ischemia in children can also lead to inattention, slow response, and decreased memory, which affects intellectual development. At the same time, they are also prone to otitis media and cause repeated upper respiratory tract infections.

How to judge whether there is sleep apnea

Many people snore without realizing it, mostly by family members or roommates. If you want to judge whether you have sleep apnea, in addition to relying on others to observe, you can also make a preliminary judgment through the following symptoms.

1. Get up in the morning with dry mouth, dry tongue and throat discomfort.

2. After waking up, there is no relief from fatigue and sleepiness during the day.

3. Inattention, memory loss.

4. Get up frequently at night.

5. Easy to wake up during sleep or difficulty falling asleep.

6. Emotional instability.

7. Exacerbation of the original chronic diseases, such as unstable blood pressure.

If you have the above symptoms, you may have sleep breathing disorder, and it is recommended to see a doctor as soon as possible. Doctors can confirm the diagnosis based on symptoms and polysomnography.

Standard polysomnography monitoring requires patients to stay in a specific sleep monitoring room in the hospital for at least one night to collect sleep structure, sleep depth, arousal status, respiratory airflow, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen content, and brain during the entire night. Various information such as electricity. On the second day, a professional doctor will manually analyze the monitoring results, and finally a complete report will be issued.

There are also many portable sleep monitoring and examination equipment, which can be installed and taken home for monitoring, and then returned to the hospital the next day, which can reduce the discomfort of patients in the hospital and improve the accuracy.

In the future, we look forward to enabling everyone to complete the diagnosis without leaving home through wearable devices. This set of wearable sleep monitoring equipment can send sleep monitoring information instantly through the cloud after a simple operation. These monitoring information can include ECG, EEG, EMG, blood pressure, respiratory rate, respiratory airflow, blood oxygen saturation, sound and electricity, etc. All data collection can be done at home, and the information collection is transmitted to the cloud via mobile APP , Intelligent analysis can be completed in an instant. Our team has also been developing it for 5 years, and it should be just around the corner to walk around the patient.

How to treat snoring

The pathological mechanism of sleep-disordered breathing diseases is complicated. Therefore, treatment methods are diverse. At present, it is advocated to implement individualized comprehensive treatment according to the characteristics of patients' different conditions. For some obese patients with excessive body mass index, weight loss should be encouraged and sleep on their sides as much as possible. For patients with other bad habits, such as smoking, drinking, or drug abuse, it is recommended to regulate good habits.

For more severe patients, clinical treatment mainly includes noninvasive positive airway pressure (NPPV) treatment, oral appliance treatment, or surgical intervention treatment, including nasal cavity expansion, pharyngeal cavity correction surgery, Han-UPPP surgery, etc. Children should be treated actively, so as not to affect their intelligence and physical development, they can be treated with drugs, and if necessary, tonsils or adenoids can be removed.