Sound Effects Snorers(打鼾的人) have always been made jokes. In cartoons，their nasal roar 1ifts the roof off houses. In situation comedies，there's the wife who rolls her eves at her snoring bedmate. But in reality，it's not all that funny. In fact，snoring can be a nightmare for snorers and their troubled partners. who may wake up several times a night to poke，and maybe hoist loved ones onto their sides for a 1ittle relief. Risks of Snoring Problems But the nightly racket is more than a potential relationship strain. According to the latest research, an increasingly older and heavier population may make this condition an even greater health risk than we previously thought. For Maggie Moss-Tucker. successful treatment for a longtime snoring problem came almost by accident. One fall morning in 2005，she saw a sign at her local gym seeking snorers as volunteers for a study at Boston's Brigham &Women's Hospital. Moss-Tucker, now 56, was intrigued. She had started snoring nearly a decade earlier. “I'd tried everything to stop. ”she says. from sleeping upright to using nose strips or a mouth guard. But to her and her husband's dismay. nothing worked. When she signed up for the study and spent a night at a suburban Boston sleep lab, she found out why. After reviewing her sleep patterns and oxygen levels, researchers told her that her snoring was actually an indication of something worse. She suffered from a sleep apnea(呼吸暂停)，a condition in which patients stop breathing repeatedly as they sleep and can wake up as many as 100 times a night—often without remembering it. That kind of revelation has led to doctors re-evaluating a condition once treated as little more than a nuisance. “In the past. snoring has been treated like a joking matter：you never talked about it with your doctor，”says Dr. David Rapoport, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at New York University Medical Center (NYC. . “But when it becomes very prominent or such that it wakes you up OF interferes with brea-thing，it can be a problem. ” Sleep apnea，in which the airway becomes blocked of. 1ess often. the brain fails to properly control breathing during sleeping. can be viewed as one extreme of the snoring spectrum. Soft snoring. which is not generally considered a health hazard. would be at the other end. As the sound and persistence of a patient's snoring grows，so do the health concerns. A study published in the March I issue of the journal Sleep found that loud snorers had a 40 percent greater risk than non-snorers of suffering from high blood pressure, 34 percent greater odds of having a heart attack and a 67 percent greater chance of having a stroke. That's a problem given the number of noisy sleepers out there. In a recent poll by the National Sleep Foundation， about one third of US working adults reported snoring at least a few nights in the previous month. Snoring generally worsens with age so the rate is even higher among the elderly. And，contrary to common perceptions，it's nearly as common in women as men. Menopause(更年期) appears to be a factor，as is weight. Being overweight can cause thickness in the airway tube， holding back the flow of oxygen. Treatment of Snoring Problems Yet many who regularly snore don't realize that it could be bad for their health. The research linking hypertension, cardiac problems and loud snoring is relatively new. And though awareness of sleep apnea is growing, specialists say the condition is still vastly undertreated. Primary-care physicians don't routinely ask patients about the quality of their sleep—though that is beginning to change and few patients think to tell their doctors that they're snoring, unless it becomes hazardous to their partner. Sleep specialists estimate that between 12 million and 18 million Americans have some form. of sleep apnea but many of them, like Moss-Tucker，remain undiagnosed for years. Re