Medicine: Snore Control

Dr. Jerome F. Strauss of Chicago takes snoring seriously. In a preliminary report in last week's Archives of Otolaryngology, he discusses snoring as a marital problem and offers a medical solution. Says he:

"True snoring must be ... defined as, a coarse, low-pitched noise produced by vibrating soft tissues in the nasopharynx of a sleeping person." Sometimes snoring is caused by an abnormality of the breathing passages (like adenoids) which can often be corrected. The tough cases are the ones with "an essentially normal nose and throat" who just snore.

The sonic effect, he adds, is "due to a fluttering action produced by currents of air acting ... in a manner similar to the action of wind on a flag. . . . The snore tone is constant and depends on the length, density and flexibility of the moving parts.... Each soft palate and uvula must have its own individual 'flutter ratio.'"

Dr. Strauss's idea is to alter the flutter ratio by stiffening the fluttering parts with small areas of scar tissue. These are produced by tiny injections of an irritating drug, sylnasol, which produces small fibrous areas wherever injected. He tried sylnasol on seven married patients. Treatment was repeated every week for five or six weeks. The only discomforts reported were a feeling of thickness at the back of the throat or a five-minute earache.

One patient was completely cured; three snored so gently that their spouses were greatly relieved; three cases were failures (but two of these are continuing treatment). Says Dr. Strauss: "My own feeling is that the failures were due to errors in diagnosis. ... To draw conclusions from the evidence presented would be decidedly premature, and the evidence itself is offered with conservative enthusiasm."