Care For Your Sleep

Snoring is quite a serious problem that the majority of senior people have to experience. It is a condition when the air a person takes in causes vibrations of the relaxed tissues in the throat. As a result, quite loud and unpleasant harsh sounds are created. Snoring is not only disturbing for the people around, it can also indicate pretty serious health problems. According to the specialists, the main causes of snoring include such factors as having extra weight, suffering from sleep apnea, nasal conditions and the specifics of mouth anatomy, alcohol consumption before going to sleep, and others.

Actually, ineffective weight management should be considered the most common cause and the most serious inclination to snoring. Recent researches demonstrated that those people who are affected by snoring usually have extra weight and have to fight against other consequences of this problem (including breathlessness, varicose veins, etc.). Based on the findings of such studies, the scientists offered a new approach to the treatment, which can help thousands of people stop snoring.

The experts are convinced that in order to achieve positive results and stop snoring, it can be enough to lower the person’s weight for 10%, and this will cause a substantial snoring relief for quite a long period of time. “In the majority of people, extra weight causes cessation of breathing at night, that is why the risk of developing such habit as snoring is much higher,” a Spanish researcher comments. According to this scientists, snoring relief is something very important as snoring is linked to serious disruption of cardio-vascular system function and can cause a stroke.

The experiments in Spain involved middle-aged men and women, who suffered from regular snoring. They were offered a healthy nutrition plan and effective weight management techniques, which helped the participants to shed 20-25 lbs. As a result, 35% of the participants managed to achieve a substantial snoring relief and be back to normal breathing patterns during their night’s sleep. At that those participants, who did not follow the diet displayed no changes in their night’s snoring routine.

Do you like staying in bed till noon, napping in the afternoons and going to sleep before midnight? It turned out that such habit is not good for your health at many perspectives. Longer sleep is linked to a lack of physical activities, slowed down chemical processes in the body, increased risks of having such serious diseases as diabetes, hypertension and others, weight management problems, and so on. Recently, the specialists at the University Hospital of Madrid in Spain found one more reason to avoid having too much sleep: according to the results of their study, published the European Journal of Neurology, excessive sleep (more than 9 hours a day) can increase the risks of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in senior age.

During this study, the experts questioned 3,286 women and men over 65 on their lifestyle, including their usual daily sleep duration (night’s and afternoon sleeps). The patients provided the scientists with detailed information about their daily routine and sleep patterns. Then, the patients were tracked for three-year period of time, during which about 140 of the volunteers started displaying the symptoms of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. At that, Spanish experts noticed the connection between sleeping more than 8-9 hours a day and mental problems of the patients.

“Long sleep may be an early symptom of dementia, or could lead to an increased risk of it,” the specialists underline. “But the mechanisms underlying this association are not readily explainable.” According to Dr. Susanne Sorenson, a representative of the Alzheimer’s Society, this research did not result in finding a reason of the connection between long sleep and dementia. Early studies showed that in many cases, longer sleep duration is linked to prolonged depression and depressive mood, which, in turn, can cause dementia. “As currently only a third of people with dementia ever receive a formal diagnosis, more research is now needed to investigate these results,” Dr. Sorrenson says.