Snoring cure: It’s in the tongue
Exercise technique works, says doctor, but requires a lot of time
Airway Fit
Sunday to Nov. 1 | Kerrisdale Community Centre
Cost and info: $130 (four two-hour sessions), https://ca.apm.activecommunities.com/vancouver
Given all the money spent on anti-snoring gadgets — leaving aside the more drastic step of surgery — Vancouver’s Howard Tseng sees an opportunity to train people out of snoring.
Tseng, a recent engineering graduate from the University of Toronto, is bringing a program of breathing techniques and mouth exercises to Englishspeaking audiences in Vancouver for the first time this month. It’s based on the work of his father, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Taiwan, and research that says it works.
Tseng has created AirwayFit, an in-person and online training program he says can cure snoring, mild sleep apnea and even help with asthma. He concedes, however, that its non-invasive techniques won’t overcome the forces of obesity or heavy drinking or tranquillizers that contribute to snoring.
Loud snoring moved years ago from under the heading “annoying, but normal” to “possible health problem.”
That’s when sales of bedside breathing apparatus started to take off, along with custommade mouthpieces all designed to silence snoring and its evil brother, sleep apnea. The latter causes its sufferers to stop breathing many times each night for seconds or even minutes, restarting with a gasp.
At the core of AirwayFit is the fact that the position of a person’s tongue is behind snoring and sleep apnea. The sound of sawing logs is caused when the tongue muscle slips backward, covering some or all of the relatively small tubelike airway behind it, the pharynx. The typical causes are sleeping on your back, too much fat around the neck which narrows the airway and weak muscles, sometimes due to aging.
The answer, Tseng says, is to make your tongue stronger through five minutes of exercise a day. That way it is more likely to stay in its proper place during sleep, with its tip touching the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth.
His entertaining set of mouth exercises include sticking your tongue out, up, down and all around.
“Do the practice as frequently as you can,” say AirwayFit’s training program. “Such as when you are driving (just make sure you don’t turn your head and face the other driver),” it adds helpfully.
Dr. John Fleetham, founder and co-director of the Vancouver Acute Sleep Disorder Program at UBC Hospital, says tongue exercises have been proven to help with snoring and sleep apnea, but they can be more time-consuming than Tseng estimates.
“Having someone spend 30 minutes a day for the rest of their life is a big investment of time ... It’s something most people aren’t prepared to do,” says Fleetham.
“If it was my patient, I would much rather they exercise for 30 minutes a day for their general health than do this. But it is helpful, usually in addition to other treatments rather than to replace them.”
Many patients who go through the sleep disorder program ask about alternatives to standard treatment from continuous positive airway pressure machines and custom- made mouth devices, Fleetham says.
The pressure machine is the most effective for most people in keeping the throat open through a flow of pressurized air, but not everyone can, or will, wear the cumbersome face mask it requires.
Oral devices that look a bit like mouth guards for sports hold the jaw shut, keeping the tongue forward. They don’t work for everyone, he says, but are easier to use that a pressure machine.
Those treatments are still the most popular even though they cost anywhere from $1,000 to $ 3,000, typically an out- ofpocket expense.
“Snoring can be a symptom of sleep apnea and sleep apnea can be a very significant condition with a variety of serious consequences. It’s a chronic disease for which you need to have an ongoing treatment,” Fleetham explains.
Untreated sleep apnea not only leaves the sufferer tired, it increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart problems and Type 2 diabetes.
With all that at stake, Tseng says there’s a lot of public interest in a low-tech, low-cost treatment. He also teaches people how to change their breathing patterns to a slow, even rhythm using the diaphragm — the muscle below the lungs — rather than with the chest muscles.
What starts as a conscious exercise at the beginning can become an unconscious habit, he says. But it takes time.
“That’s one of the downsides ... There is no silver bullet.”