![\"Snoring](\"https:\/\/blueheronhealthnews.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Snoring-302355496.jpg\")
Snoring (and, even more seriously, sleep apnea) is not just an innocent annoyance.<\/p>\nSnoring (and, even more seriously, sleep apnea) is not just an innocent annoyance.<\/p>\n
When you snore, you don\u2019t breathe properly, and your blood oxygen level goes down.<\/p>\n
And according to a new study, published in the European Respiratory Journal,<\/em> this can cause the one disease most of us dread the most.<\/p>\n The authors obtained their participants from the European Sleep Apnea Database, which records the medical records of people who have visited 33 medical centers across Europe.<\/p>\n They identified 20,000 adults who had been diagnosed with sleep apnea and had enough information to rank them from the least to the most severe cases.<\/p>\n When analyzing their complete medical records, they found that two percent of their subjects had also had a cancer diagnosis at some time in their lives.<\/p>\n It turned out that sleep apnea severity could predict the prevalence of cancer, especially in women.<\/p>\n Women with the most severe sleep apnea were much more likely to have a cancer diagnosis than women with mild sleep apnea.<\/p>\n This relationship between sleep apnea and cancer was present in men but was much weaker.<\/p>\n Why does this happen?<\/p>\n Most likely because cancer cells don\u2019t function well in an oxygen-rich environment. When you stop breathing due to sleep apnea, or even when your breathing is constricted due to snoring, your blood oxygen level goes down, which then causes snoring.<\/p>\n This is yet another reason why it\u2019s so important to treat snoring and sleep apnea as soon as possible.<\/p>\n