NEW YORK, Oct 04 (Reuters Health) -- Repeated awakenings mean that the partners of loud, frequent snorers lose an average of one full hour of sleep per night, according to researchers. They believe that this chronic lack of sleep may have a negative impact on health.
"Loud snoring has been treated as a social problem when, in fact, it may have significant health consequences for the snorer's bed partner," write Dr. William Beninati and colleagues at the Sleep Disorders Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Their findings are published in the October issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
The authors used polysomnography (a sleep test that includes monitoring of brain waves, heart beat and breathing) to track the sleep patterns of 10 married couples in which the husband was undergoing treatment for obstructive sleep apnea. Sleep patterns were compared before and after the husbands' sleep apnea was treated with continuous positive airway pressure, a technique that uses an oxygen mask-like device to keep breathing passages open during sleep.
In sleep apnea, the collapse of structures at the back of the throat during sleep causes a temporary closure of the airway. Loud, frequent snoring occurs as the sleeper attempts to re-open these blocked passages. About 4% of all women and 9% of men are affected by sleep apnea.
According to the Mayo team, wives unanimously "complained of sleep disturbance from their husband's snoring" when the condition went untreated. In fact, the women lost an average 62 minutes of sleep per night in the untreated versus treated phase of the study.
In a Mayo Clinic statement, study senior author Dr. John Shepard concluded that "eliminating a patient's snoring and obstructive sleep apnea... significantly increased bed partners' quality and quantity of sleep."
In an accompanying editorial, Drs. William Dement and Clete Kushida, of the Sleep Disorders Research Center in Palo Alto, California, write that the health risks linked to sleep apnea -- which include impaired daytime function and increased cardiovascular risk -- may extend to patients' bed partners, as well. They say that "until proven otherwise, we should simply double the numbers for the prevalence of sleep disorders in the United States and say that a problem we have called 'the largest health problem in America' is twice as big as we previously thought."
