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Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
It has ruined a lot of sleep at night, and no doubt a lot of relationships too. Trying to sleep next to a snoring partner is exactly that: trying. Once the engines go away, there are few countermeasures other than a shove, earplugs and the patience of a saint.
That’s the thing about snoring: many of us consider it little more than an embarrassment or a nuisance and grudgingly accept it. But the accumulated results suggest that this trivialises an important and common health problem.
Snoring is not only associated with broken sleep, it can be a warning sign of problems ahead and also seems to have some serious potential impact on the cardiovascular system of the snorer. Despite a proliferation of remedies, there is little evidence of what works. But as sleep researchers increasingly wake up to the hidden dangers of snoring, there is hope that the nightmare will soon end.
Snoring is very common, although it is difficult to understand exactly how it is. Many snorers are not aware that they are doing it. “If I ask someone ‘Do you snore?’ “, they say “I don’t know, I’m asleep”, he says. Danny Eckertdirector of sleep health at Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute in Adelaide, Australia. “His bed partner could tell him, but a lot of people don’t have a bed partner.” In Eckert’s experience, however, it is rampant. …