Is Snoring Dangerous to Your Health?

The purpose of this commentary is to review the evidence linking simple snoring with hypertension and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. This has been a topic of numerous investigations with seemingly divergent results, mainly because of the differences in methodology employed in various studies, such as inclusion of confounding factors, type of population examined, methods of measurements and analysis, etc. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, a review of 19 studies examining the association between snoring and hypertension clearly shows that in the majority of them (14 studies) snoring was not found to be an independent risk factor. An association between snoring and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease is somewhat more difficult to assess. Analysis of 15 recent studies dealing with this issue shows that 9 of them concluded that snoring is a risk factor for vascular disease, whereas 6 studies reached the opposite conclusion. However, a detailed review of the studies showing positive association between snoring and vascular disease indicates that in some of them unsuspected sleep apnea may have accounted for this increased risk. In addition, these studies exhibit a number of inconsistencies that raise doubts as to the true validity of association between snoring and vascular disease. Finally, it docs not seem biologically plausible that snoring should be a risk factor for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease without also being a risk factor for hypertension. Consequently, based on the available information, one cannot conclude that snoring is an independent risk factor for such adverse vascular complications as hypertension and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.