Abstract
We performed an acoustic analysis of 6 patients with simple snoring and of 8 patients suffering from obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS). Simple snoring and OSAS due to a wide range of obstructive lesions from the soft palate to the base of the tongue, show a constant frequency distribution of the snoring sounds when recorded randomly for an acoustic analysis. When OSAS were mainly due to an obstruction in the soft palate, such patients tended to show two types of peak characteristics regarding the snoring sounds. When we evaluated 30 different snoring sounds during one night, the patients with simple snoring sounds showed a single peak at a frequency of less than 1,000Hz, while OSAS patients showed several peaks at higher than 1,000Hz. From these results, we thus conclude that snoring sounds should undergo an acoustic analysis at night in order to better screen for potential patients with OSAS in the future.
