Snoring isn't just a nuisance, it's dangerous. Why can't we treat it?

It has ruined many a night’s sleep, and no doubt a lot of relationships too. Trying to sleep next to a snoring partner is exactly that: trying. Once the engines fire up, there are few countermeasures besides a shove, earplugs and the patience of a saint.

That’s the thing about snoring: many of us consider it to be little more than an embarrassment or an annoyance and grudgingly put up with it. But accumulating findings suggest that this trivialises an important, and common, health problem.

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Snoring isn’t just associated with broken sleep, it can be a warning sign of trouble ahead and also appears to have some potentially serious impacts on the snorer’s cardiovascular system. Despite a proliferation of remedies, there is a paucity of evidence about what works. But as sleep researchers increasingly wake up to the hidden dangers of snoring, there is hope the nightmare will soon end.

Snoring is very common, though getting a handle on exactly how common is difficult. Many snorers are blissfully unaware that they do it. “If you ask someone ‘Do you snore?’, they’ll say ‘I dunno, I’m sleeping’, ” says Danny Eckert, director of sleep health at Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute in Adelaide, Australia. “Their bed partner might tell them, but a lot of people don’t have a bed partner.” In Eckert’s experience, however, it is rampant.…