"Soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then a stronger one, then a half-a-dozen horrible ones like the last water sucking down the plughole of a bath tub." Mark Twain's description of the act of snoring in Tom Sawyer Abroad remains one of the best. And so is the statement it then gives rise to: "There ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore." Except that now it seems that Twain may have been wrong.
Yesterday's report in Chest, the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians, casts rare light on a phenomenon that has caused tensions between married couples and partners all over the world for centuries without a proper cure ever being found. One of the difficult problems is that snorers have to rely entirely on the reporting of others - since it is in the nature of things that they are unable, as Twain observed, to hear themselves doing it.
The Chest article, written by Igor Fajdiga from Slovenia, who used computerise CT imaging methods on 40 patients, found that the soft tissue at the back of the roof of the mouth (the soft palate) is the main structure that supports snoring. Its repetitive closure presents an obstacle to breathing. This in turn produces the snoring sound and so should be the target of any treatment. The paper confirms Daniel Bernoulli's discovery, as long ago as 1738, that the streaming of air through the mouth is the key issue. Older and heavier people are more likely to snore, while alcohol and sedatives can worsen it. Contrary to popular opinion, nasal blockages are not responsible for snoring though they may "amplify the loudness".
Although these findings do not offer a cure they do provide an explanation and, by extension, for other more serious disorders such as obstructive sleep apnea (when a sufferer wakes up unknowingly many times in order to continue breathing). Snoring, like hay fever, is not taken as seriously as it ought to be because there is an inherent jokiness about it. If studies such as this one act as a wake-up call then an irritating global problem could be put to sleep once and for all.
