Although common snoring can be annoying and may have even caused a few relationships to fail, it’s generally not dangerous to your health (unless your bedmate tries to keep you from snoring by holding a pillow over your face, or if you slept in the same hotel as John Wesley Hardin, the notorious Texas outlaw who shot a man in a hotel room in Abilene, Kansas, just because he was snoring). Sleep apnea is a different story. Sleep apnea is a potentially life-threatening condition in which people stop breathing dozens, even hundreds, of times each night. In obstructive sleep apnea, the soft tissue collapses, completely blocking airflow from both the nasal and oral passages for periods ranging from 10 seconds to more than a minute, which prevents oxygen from reaching the lungs. When you experience a fully obstructive event, you and those around you don’t hear anything because no air is moving, so nothing is vibrating. You’re struggling to breathe against a closed airway. When your struggle to breathe finally produces an arousal or awakening, you voluntarily open your airway. Then you take some explosive breaths followed by a return to snoring until the next airway blockage occurs. In central sleep apnea, the airway is open, but you don’t attempt to draw in a breath because the mechanism that regulates your breathing has temporarily failed. Snoring affects breathing in many ways. In normal breathing  air flows to the lungs primarily through the nose but can also come in through the mouth. When something causes the soft palate and uvula to collapse into the airway, they touch the back of the throat and shut off the airflow through the nose, which forces the sleeper to switch to mouth breathing . In sleep apnea, airflow from both the nose and the mouth are completely blocked by the soft tissue collapse, preventing oxygen from reaching the lungs. To help you distinguish between ordinary and dangerous snoring, we review some common causes of everyday snoring and then take a look at what causes the thunderous snoring associated with sleep apnea.

One night you wake up because someone has just started a chain saw next to your head, and discover your charming bedmate, the one who’s never snored before, sawing logs in bed. Of course, he’s still sound asleep, but you’re now wide-awake. His snoring is so loud that you’re not likely to get back to the Land of Nod unless you move to another room. How could someone who never snored before suddenly start snoring? Several different conditions — both simple and more complex — can cause snoring,

If your bedmate tells you that you snore so loudly that he or she has to sleep in another room, and he or she can still hear you from that room, you may have sleep apnea, a breathing disorder marked by frequent interruptions of breathing during sleep. During an apnea episode, you completely stop breathing for at least 10 seconds. The struggle to breathe triggers an emergency alert response in your brain. You wake up just enough to open your airway and gasp for breath, and then fall right back asleep, usually without knowing what has happened. To meet the medical definition of sleep apnea, these episodes must occur at least five times per hour of sleep. Most people with sleep apnea suffer from 20 to 60 such episodes per hour during the night so they wake up feeling unrefreshed. Yet, many sufferers aren’t aware they have a problem.

Apnea is derived from the Greek word apnoia that means “without breath.” Hypopnea is a kind of abnormally reduced breathing that can also affect people with sleep apnea. Until recently, many medical professionals were still in the dark about sleep apnea and its implications for other health problems. Many family and primary care doctors still don’t look for signs of sleep deprivation in their patients who report excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), and fail to order additional tests when a patient complains that his or her bedmate snores so loudly it shakes the bedroom walls.

You may be saying, “Well, so what if I snore? I’m not going to waste a bunch of time and money getting treated for that!” Think again. Sleep apnea is a life-threatening condition that can lead to a variety of medical problems and even increase your risk of having an accident. And, the longer it goes untreated, the progressively worse it gets. So you may want to get it looked into after all. Today, not tomorrow.