Is Your Snoring a Sign of Heart Trouble? The Sleep Apnea-Heart Disease Connection

You and your sleep partner might joke about snoring or brush it off as a minor annoyance. But that funny nighttime noise isn’t always a joking matter. In fact, snoring is one of the most common warning signs of sleep apnea, a serious sleep disorder that can affect your overall health.

Sleep apnea doesn’t just interrupt your sleep. It repeatedly deprives your body and vital organs of oxygen, placing significant strain on your cardiovascular system. Over time, this added stress can increase your risk for serious health problems, including heart disease.

At Respacare in Bridgewater, New Jersey, our sleep medicine experts, Dr. Nehal Mehta and Dr. Prashant Patel, explain the connection between sleep apnea and heart disease.

Snoring vs. sleep apnea

Snoring occurs when air can’t freely move through your nose and throat. This restricted airflow causes the surrounding tissues to vibrate, creating the familiar snoring sound. 

While snoring can disrupt your sleep partner, it isn’t always a cause for concern, especially if it’s light, steady, and occasional. Factors such as sleeping on your back, allergies, or alcohol use may contribute to this type of snoring.

Snoring becomes more concerning when it’s a loud noise, irregular, or accompanied by pauses in breathing, choking, or gasping for air. These symptoms may point to sleep apnea, a disorder characterized by repeated interruptions in breathing while you sleep. In most cases, these pauses occur when throat tissues collapse and block the airway during sleep.

Because breathing repeatedly stops and restarts, people with sleep apnea struggle to get deep, restorative sleep, even if they spend enough time in bed. 

How sleep apnea affects heart health

Researchers continue to study the link between sleep apnea and heart disease, but they theorize that several factors may play a role. 

Though brief, the frequent pauses in breathing lower blood oxygen levels, forcing the heart to pump harder to deliver oxygen throughout the body. At the same time, these breathing disruptions trigger the release of stress hormones, increasing blood pressure and heart rate. 

Further, sleep apnea affects the quality and quantity of sleep you get each night. Without adequate, high-quality sleep, your heart doesn’t have the opportunity to recover from the physical stress it experiences during the day.

As a result, untreated sleep apnea increases the risk of several cardiovascular conditions,  including arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation (Afib), coronary artery disease (CAD), and heart failure. 

Is your snoring a sign of heart trouble?

Snoring alone doesn’t mean you have heart disease. However, it may signal an underlying sleep disorder that deserves medical attention. 

We specialize in diagnosing and treating sleep disorders like sleep apnea. After a consultation, we may order a sleep disorder test to better understand the cause of your snoring. We offer both at-home and lab sleep studies. 

If you have sleep apnea, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy is considered the gold standard treatment. We also provide alternative options, including the Somnoguard® oral appliance and Inspire® therapy..

If your snoring is loud, disruptive, or causes you to wake up gasping for air, it may put your heart health at risk. Don’t ignore the signs. Contact us today to schedule an appointment with our sleep experts.