If you often hear your husband making a loud noise when he sleeps, specially when he is in deep sleep it may be very possible that he is suffering from a condition called snoring. More often than not, those who are actually snoring are not aware of their condition until someone they sleep with tells them. More often than not, it is their spouses or room mates than suffer because they are the ones bothered and disturbed by the vibrating noise.
What is snoring?
Snoring is a special condition that usually affects the male population more than the females. It is estimated that about 45% of men and 30% of women are being affected by this condition and the usual occurrence happen after they have contracted a virus infection, if they consumed alcohol or if they have gained weight. They also reported that they have developed snoring after taking certain medications.
Snoring is being caused by vibrations that form sound waves. Like other sound, our voice for example, as we speak our vocal chords produce sound waves that result to our voice. Similarly, while we are sleeping, a turbulent airflow can cause the tissue of our nose and throat to vibrate that results to what we call as snoring.
What are the possible treatments for snoring?
If persistent snoring has reached the level of affecting your relationship with your spouse or room mate, then it is wise to seek treatment. There are two basic treatment options: one being surgical and the other non-surgical. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the second option.
What are the different types of non-surgical treatments?
Depending on what is the cause of your snoring problem you may be able to identify what is the best solution. What do I mean by this? Let us say that overweight is the main reason why you snore, then I guess the best solution is to lose some weight by changing your diet and engaging into regular exercise. If the cause is your drinking alcohol, then you must either minimize your alcohol consumption or completely eliminate it. This maybe categorized as a behavior approach to treating snoring problem.
The next category is called dental devices.
As we have already learned earlier, snoring can be made worse by the normal airflow that goes out of the narrowed area in the throat. This narrowing is being caused by the tongue and palate pushing backward during sleep. What dental devices do is it holds the jaw forward and at the same time, the tongue being attached to the front of the jaw is also being held forward.
There is however a drawback to this, you need to wear this every night in order for it to work effectively and it cause, it excessive production of saliva. One snoring dental device that is available without going to your dentist for a fitting is the Aveo TSD Stop Snoring Mouthpiece, It can be purchased from your local pharmacy.
Watch out for part 2 of this article wherein I will share more of the different non-surgical treatments of snoring. To learn more about your stop snoring options please visit out local pharmacy and talk to one of our friendly staff.