Why pregnant women snore

This can lead to snoring. Weight gained through pregnancy can lead to increased tissue in the neck and throat. This narrows your upper airway, and restricts your ability to breathe freely.

Congestion from other causes, like a cold or the flu, can also result in snoring. Nasal irritation often increases at night when snoring is most likely to be a problem. Loud snoring can be a symptom of obstructive sleep apnoea OSA. Snoring is a common night-time problem in pregnancy, with mums-to-be three times more likely to start snoring by the final trimester.

My hubby snores his head off though, so I look on it as divine retribution! Changes in hormone levels dilate blood vessels and cause mucous membranes to swell in your nose. This causes congestion and a narrowing of your nasal passages forcing you to breathe through your mouth as you sleep, and, more often than not, snore. It also has sedative effects so will help you sleep too, hopefully! We found no such association; instead our data imply that the BMI before pregnancy is of greater importance which is supported by data from a larger study [ 10 ].

This corresponds with risk factors for OSA in a non-pregnant, normal population [ 30 , 31 ] and the relationship between high BMI and snoring during pregnancy has also been reported in a recent cross-sectional survey [ 32 ].

High pre-pregnancy BMI has also been identified as a greater risk factor than weight gain for pregnancy and delivery complications such as antepartum stillbirth, cesarean delivery, instrumental delivery, preeclampsia and shoulder dystocia [ 33 ]. We found that the women who started to snore, but not the habitual snorers, had higher Epworth Sleepiness Score and higher incidence of excessive daytime sleepiness than the non-snoring women already in early pregnancy, indicating that these women might already have had disturbed sleep before they started to snore.

Association between sleepiness and snoring among pregnant women has, to the best of our knowledge, not been described earlier. The relationship between snoring and restless legs syndrome found in this study has been analyzed in an earlier report [ 34 ] and has also been described in a general population [ 35 ].

As previously mentioned, there are numerous reports describing an association between sleep disturbances and adverse obstetric and neonatal outcome. One of the first was Franklin et al. A recently published large American cohort study also found that new-onset snoring during pregnancy is a strong risk factor for gestational hypertension and preeclampsia [ 10 ]. There are theoretical possibilities that snoring might cause gestational hypertension and preeclampsia, since snoring is the cardinal symptom of obstructive sleep apnea OSA , which in turn is known as an evident risk factor for the development of hypertension in the general population [ 36 ].

We found no significant association between snoring and preeclampsia. Although there are reports describing that the sex of the expected child might impact the pregnancy in terms of plasma levels of human chorionic gonadotropin hCG [ 37 ] and pregnancy outcome [ 38 ], we do not consider this finding being of clinical relevance.

The main limitations of this study are connected to the subjective nature of many of the measured variables. No data about snoring was objectively recorded, but taken from the questionnaires, filled in by the pregnant women themselves. However, the majority of the women in the study were married and most of them were accompanied by their husband to the visits to the ACC, enabling, to some extent, verification of the snoring. Information about edema was also collected from the questionnaires, but the pregnant women are mostly very aware of the classification of edema since it is checked by the midwife at every visit to the ACC.

Likewise sleepiness was reported by the women themselves, but the used instrument, the Epworth Sleepiness Score ESS , is validated for measuring daytime sleepiness due to snoring, obstructive sleep apnea and other causes [ 39 ]. It has recently also been validated for measurement of sleepiness among pregnant women [ 40 ]. Since most adverse obstetric outcome are rare, a large group of women are needed to verify statically assured correlations.

The major strength of the study is its prospective design. The women were recruited in early pregnancy and followed throughout their pregnancy and delivery in order to avoid recall bias. The women were consecutively collected from a normal pregnant population.

Since no objective data on snoring or OSA were collected, an obvious design element to be included in any future large prospective study would be a full respiratory recording on all contributing women. The frequency of snoring does increase during pregnancy and is related to high BMI at the start of pregnancy and higher frequency of edema in late pregnancy, but not to the degree of weight gain.

Women who started to snore during pregnancy, but not the women who snored already from early pregnancy, had higher degree of sleepiness than the non snorers in both early and late pregnancy. Ann Intern Med. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth. Eur Neurol. Article PubMed Google Scholar. Asso with fetal outcome. CAS Google Scholar. Sleep Med. PubMed Google Scholar. Eur Respir J. Am J Obstet Gynecol.

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