What is snoring and why we snore?

Snoring is an unpleasant, often loud sound occurring during sleep, which may interfere with your and your loved ones time of rest.

There are many factors that may cause snoring. Anatomy of your mouth, allergies, a cold, alcohol consumption, being overweight. When you fall asleep and go from the light sleep to the deep sleep, the muscles in your mouth and throat relax. Sometimes the tissues in your throat relax so much that they start to block your airway and vibrate. That’s where the annoying sound comes from.

Is snoring just a cosmetic problem or may it become a danger to my health?

In early stages snoring may be just an embarassing problem, which makes your life a little bit harder. It can also be extremely disturbing to everyone who happens to share the bed or a room with you. Unfortunately, quite often snoring is a symptom of a much more serious disease – sleep apnea. In this condition, your throat tissues partially or completely block your airway, preventing you from breathing.

Sleep apnea usually is characterized by periods of loud snoring followed by periods of silence when you stop or nearly stop breathing. Eventually, those pauses in breathing may force you to wake up, quite often with a loud snort or gasping sound. You sleep lightly and wake up tired.

Seek medical advice if your snoring is so loud it’s disrupting your partner’s sleep or/and if you wake up choking or gasping.

What might be the consequences of sleep apnea?

Snoring and sleep apnea can cause a lot of problems. A constant feeling of lack of sleep, tiredness, difficulties to concentrate, memory and learning issue, fatigue during the day are among the most common ones. A person who suffers from snoring and sleep apnea may become ineffective at work and endanger (unvoluntarly) themselves and their coworkers. They also constitute a threat for themselves and the others on the roads.

Many scientific studies indicates that sleep apnea may contribute to the development of depression, anxiety and impotence. It also increases the risk of developing hypertension and ischemic heart disease and can lead to stroke.

What leads to snoring and sleep apnea?

There are some risk factors that can lead to the development of snoring and/or sleep apnea.

• Being a man – yes, it’s not fair but men are more likely to snore or have a sleep apnea;
• Being overweight – if you are overweight you have a fair chance that you’ll snore or have a sleep apnea at some point in your life;
• Having a narrow airway – some people have large tonsils or really long soft palate that can cause snoring;
• Having nasal issues – some people have a structural defects in their airway, such as deviated septum, or chronically congested nose that can lead to snoring;
• Drinking alcohol – alcohol relaxes muscles, including throat muscles, that can cause snoring;

I snore… What to do? Where to start?

You should start with:

• significant weight-loss, in case of obesity or being overweight;
• reduction of alcohol intake;
• quitting smoking;
• stop taking sedatives and sleeping pills (they contribute to tissue relaxation), especially when they are not prescribed by your doctor!!
• sleeping without a pillow and/or avoidance of sleeping on your back (when you sleep on your back there’s a bigger risk of airway closure).

If, despite using all these tips, you still snore and you are getting more and more tired, come to see our laryngologist. We will find an effective treatment.

At SWISS MEDICUS MC Lodz we offer you Coblation procedure to reduce snoring.

What is Coblation?

Coblation is an advanced technology that quickly and effectively removes and shrinks soft palate tissue and bulky tissue of the tongue base using gentle radio frequency energy and natural saline. Coblation is not a heat-driven process. As a result, surrounding healthy tissue is preserved allowing for a fast and easy recovery.

The proven, patented Coblation process has been used successfully in over two million procedures by surgeons in ear, nose and throat (ENT) and other areas of medine.

Coblation-assisted soft palate treatment is a medical innovation that can bring your snoring under control with a simple, quick procedure. This revolutionary treatment:

• Results in noticeable snoring improvement within 1-4 weeks
• Palate surgery can be performed in your doctors office, under local anaesthesia or if preferred under a short general anaesthetic
• Tongue base surgery requires a short general anaesthetic
• The procedure often takes less than ten to fifteen minutes. (Patients typically return home shortly after the procedure)

We preform surgical procedures using Coblation such as:

1. COBLATION ASSISTED NASAL TURBINATE REDUCTION
2. COBLATION ASSISTED SOFT PALATE REDUCTION
   
3. COBLATION ASSITED UVULOPALATOPLASTY
4. COBLATION ASSITED TONSILLECTOMY/TONSILLOTOMY

All Coblation prodecures at our medical center are carried out by MD Marcin Kubiak.

This is our state-of-the-art Coblation equipment:

Prices of procedure vary but you may finance them through a system made specifically for medical industry – MEDIRATY! Our stuff will be more than happy to answer all of your questions.

Call us today to find out more!