Friday, November 24, 2006

Surgery Tips to Cure Snoring

Snoring can be classified into two: mild snoring and excessive snoring. The former is easily curable. A change in sleeping position or avoiding some substances before going to bed usually does the trick. However, if your snoring has created an anti-social impact to the people around you, then it may already have complicated to sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a sleeping disorder in which a person stops breathing for about 10 seconds resulting in oxygen deprivation. Oxygen and sleep deprivation can lead to high blood pressure, hypertension, other cardiovascular diseases, or stroke. Sleep apnea makes a person unproductive during the day and is irritable most of the time due to being sleep deprived.

How would you know if you need surgery?

Snoring should never be tolerated. If implants, anti-snoring appliances, and continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) have not worked for you, it might well be time to get some surgical tips to cure snoring. There are many surgical tips to cure snoring and physicians usually perform a thorough examination to evaluate your nose, mouth, and pharynx to determine what is causing the sleep apnea.

Surgical tips to cure snoring include septoplasty. This operation aims to straighten the cartilage between the interior of the nose. Septoplasty may need to come with a pharyngeal surgery. Somnoplasty is a minor surgery that involves reduction of the soft tissue in the upper air passage. In cases wherein the tonsils and adenoids are enlarged, the surgical tips to cure snoring or sleep apnea are tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, respectively. Both procedures involve removing the tonsils and the adenoids (the gland behind the throat). However, recent studies noted that the tonsils play some role in defending the body against illnesses so that you might want to think it over before having them amputated.

Your physician might recommend a palate surgery to remove some parts of the soft palate to eliminate any obstruction to your breathing. As snoring is mostly caused by the vibrations made by the uvula (the tissue hanging down on the far end your palate), doctors may also consider removing it if they find it as the cause of the snoring.

A maxillomandibular advancement, is the last among the surgical tips to cure snoring or sleep apnea that your doctor might want to perform if all the other treatments were unsuccessful. This involves a complex procedure of surgically cutting the bones holding the upper jaw and the lower jaw and the latter is moved forward to about 12 millimeters.

There are always pros and cons to everything. Undergoing surgery to cure sleep apnea may have its discomforts but the long-term effects could be beneficial to you and your loved ones.