Aside from disrupting anyone who can hear it, loud snoring may be a serious condition that may lead to sudden death due to cardiac arrest.
Loud snoring, medically known as obstructive sleep apnea, was the subject of a study led by Virend Somers, a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., with his colleagues. The research team would like to know if sleep apnea poses risk to sudden cardiac death among patients.
The team analyzed the results of the diagnostic polysomnogram, a machine used to detect sleep disorders, at the Mayo Clinic Sleep Disorders Center of about 10,701 participants with an average age of 53 years old. It was a 15-year period from 1987 to 2003. All the participants had never had cardiac arrest on their lifetime prior to the test and 68 percent were male.
During the observation, the researchers captured an average of 31 events per hour of apnea-hypopnea, or the changes in breathing while sleeping, wherein about 75 percent of the patients were diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea.
Among those diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, 121 patients had a sudden cardiac death and 21 patients had a resuscitated cardiac arrest within the 5-year monitoring period. The researchers gathered an annual mortality rate of 0.27 percent. This seemed to be a small number but compared to the estimated mortality rate of 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent in the general population, it was still higher which alarmed the researchers.
This study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The finding of this study is a good background for the health agencies to start developing clinical trials for obstructive sleep apnea and probably target a specific population who were most at risk to sudden cardiac death. Obstructive sleep apnea has been linked to various cardiovascular diseases and mortality prior to this study. However, it was only this research that was able to prove that sudden cardiac death may happen as you sleep especially if you have obstructive sleep apnea.
According to the American Heart Association, almost 383,000 out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrests occur annually, and 88 percent of these occur at home.
If you know someone who snores really loud when he sleeps, it is about time to give them a health warning.
