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Chronic Headaches Tied to Snoring

Posted on: Monday, 21 April 2003, 06:00 CDT

By K.L. Capozza, HealthScoutNews Reporter

HealthScoutNews -- Before you go blaming your snoring spouse for your morning headaches, you might be well-advised to evaluate your own sleep behavior.

A new study shows that people who experience chronic headaches are more likely to be snorers, and that this nighttime nasal ruckus could be causing their own daytime head pain.

The study, published in the April 22 issue of Neurology, compared the snoring habits of 206 people between the ages of 18 and 65 with chronic daily headaches to 507 people with occasional headaches.

Participants were asked how often they snored -- a behavior that's difficult to measure because the subjects are unconscious when it occurs -- and how often and how severely they experienced headaches.

Because the study relied on self-reported data, the accuracy of the findings may have been compromised. But the researchers took pains to statistically control their results for factors that might confuse the relationship between snoring and headaches. After rigorously separating out confounding factors such as gender, age, and marital status, they found that the relationship between headaches and snoring remained strong.

"These findings point to habitual snoring as a risk factor [for chronic headache] even when they statistically controlled for other known risks for chronic headache and sleep-disordered breathing," says Jeanetta Rains, director of the Center for Sleep Evaluation at Elliot Hospital in Manchester, N.H., and adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School.

One crucial question remains unanswered by the study, however: Does the snoring cause the headache or does headache cause snoring?

Snoring -- which occurs when restricted airflow vibrates against the soft tissue of the airway -- can cause a drop in the amount of oxygen in the body, resulting in a throbbing headache. But medications used to alleviate headache pain can also disturb sleep and promote snoring.

"We can't really say what the causative relationship is because we assessed the snoring at the same time as we assessed the headaches," says lead author Ann Scher, an epidemiologist at the National Institute on Aging. "Both explanations are reasonable."

In order to tease out this precise relationship, the researchers hope to conduct a clinical trial that will examine how treating snoring symptoms affects chronic headaches.

Such a study would require snoring patients to adopt lifestyle changes such as losing weight, decreasing alcohol consumption, and avoiding sleeping on their backs to curb their snoring behavior.

"Those individuals who wake up with a headache almost every morning should be asked about sleep," says Rains.

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On the Net:

American Council for Headache Education

American Sleep Apnea Association

NASA

More science, space, and technology from RedNova

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