New Information On How To Stop Snoring
If you or someone close to you snores, there’s new information on how to stop the snoring, as well as the life-threatening condition known as sleep apnea.
When the sun goes down and the lights go out in Buffalo, 25-percent of people do it. Snore, that is. “I had to move my room to the basement because I couldn’t deal with the snoring,” a woman on Elmwood Avenue tells us about her husband.
Twice as many men snore as women. “I snore like a chain saw,” says a Buffalo streets worker.
“He snores like an old man,” a Buffalo bike shop owner says, and he’s talking about his dog. But mostly it’s people who do it.
“What do you do about it?” we asked the streets worker.
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing?” we ask. “Nothing,” comes the reply.
“How can she put up with you?” we ask.
“She loves me to death,” he says, and he could be more right than he knows. That’s because snoring is annoying, it’s disruptive, but it can also be something else.
Snoring can be a warning sign about a thief in the night. It can steal your health and even your life. “High blood pressure, heart disease, and now there’s some research to indicate it might be a risk factor for stroke,” says Buffalo sleep specialist Dr. Daniel Rifkin.
The death of NFL great Reggie White in 2004 was believed caused in part by sleep apnea. So was the death of Erie County Sheriff’s Deputy Cheryl Price in 1994. “Some of these people in the laboratory actually hold their breath for minutes, two or three minutes at a time,” says Rifkin,” and it’s life-threatening.”
I know the threat first hand. I was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea in 2001. A mouthpiece to pull the lower jaw forward, surgery of the soft palate, and something called somnoplasty to stiffen the palate were among the remedies available at the time.
“They worked initially,” says Rifkin, “and then when you looked at these patients four or five years down the road, they actually stopped working. Somehow the tissue sort of reconfigured itself to bring the apnea back.”
But Rifkin says something called a CPAP–pronounced “SEE-pap”–always works. “If you can tolerate the CPAP,” I ask, “there’s a 100- percent chance it’ll work?”
“Right,” replies Rifkin. “As long as you can breathe through your nose, it should always work.”
CPAP stands for Continuous Positive Air Pressure. The air is delivered by a small bedside pump, through a plastic hose to a mask that’s held over the nose by straps which go around the head. I try it on.
“The air will flow through the holes into the nostrils,” Rifkin explains, “keeping your breathing passages open.
“I”m going to get used to this?” I ask about the clumsy-looking arrangement.
“You should,” says Rifkin. “It should eliminate both your snoring and your apnea. You’ll feel better and be healthier.”
And that’s why some people go to the trouble to put on the CPAP mask every night. It could save their life. Rifkin says we humans are built with a soft, pliable mouth and throat so that we can speak. But that also leaves people vulnerable to apnea.
“The way God made us, made us susceptible to sleep apnea,” says Rifkin, “so I guess it’s been around since Adam and Eve.”
But he adds that it doesn’t have to continue stealing health and life from so many people. He says research and experience is showing that the clumsy-looking CPAP system is proving itself as the most effect way of stopping that thief in the night.
(info by Rich Kellman from http://www.wgrz.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=30246)