I grew up listening to my father's snoring since I was a child. My mother often said that he would go to the hospital to have a look. But my father said that basically everyone snores. It's just the size of the sound. Snoring is not a disease. Is this really the case?
I don't know if you have ever been in such a situation: when you are tossing and turning in bed, someone snores beside you and sleeps soundly. In the past, people always thought that snoring, that is, snoring was a good performance of sleep quality. But did you know that snoring is sometimes a disease!
The back of the mouth is different from other parts of the human body. Although there is a cavity, there is no bone to support its formation. It is mainly through the surrounding muscles to adjust and maintain the size of the cavity. When sleeping, especially in deep sleep, the muscles of the whole body are relaxed. Due to the gravity factor, the tongue base and uvula (commonly known as the "little tongue") will move backward, making the cavity of the throat become smaller. When breathing with the nose, if the air flow is not smooth and forced to breathe through the mouth, the air flow will vibrate the soft palate at the upper back of the mouth, thus making a snoring sound, which is commonly known as' snoring '.
So, is snoring a disease? If you only snore occasionally, it is likely that the person does not put his head in the right position when he is sleeping, which makes his / her nose not ventilated. Generally, if he / she corrects his / her posture, snoring will stop. However, if such a situation often occurs, even if the head position is adjusted during sleep, it still can not be relieved. It should be noted that this may be a manifestation of sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea is defined as a apnea that lasts from seconds to minutes when you are asleep. If such a phenomenon occurs frequently, it will reduce the oxygen content in the body, resulting in a series of problems such as feeling sleepy during the day, inattention, slow reaction speed, reduced vision and so on. If children snore frequently, it may affect their growth and development, such as cognitive dysfunction, attention impairment, memory decline, psychological behavior abnormality, IQ decrease, etc. Because there are many other diseases that can cause these problems, many people don't know that they are actually suffering from snoring during sleep, or simply ignore these problems.
As early as 1836, Dickens wrote "the biography of Pickwick", there is such a character: a little fat boy, purple complexion, swollen body, strange personality, most of the day spent in eating and sleeping, usually it is difficult to wake him from the morbid sleep, and sleep often emit loud snores. This is the earliest known description of sleep apnea. If you have such a person around, you might as well ask him to go to the hospital.