a wake-up call to the potential dangers of sleep apnoea.

If they awarded Olympic medals for it, I'd be the Carl Lewis of snoring.

The volume of my snoring is legendary. I've had people in adjacent hotel rooms banging on the wall for peace and quiet. Girlfriends and wives have either put up with it, invested in ear plugs or traded me in for a quieter model. Most memorable of all, I awoke one morning after a heavy party to find that my fellow revellers who had crashed out on the floor with me had all moved into another room! It was once suggested that I take up a career in sound effects as my nocturnal noises could work equally well for a chainsaw ad or as background for an aircraft documentary.

So for most of my life, I have treated my snoring as a bit of a joke. After all, an estimated 45 percent of adults snore (mostly, but not exclusively, male) and while I have occasionally tried all manner of nasal sprays, throat sprays and herbal tablets, they have been to no avail, so I just accepted it as a fact of life.

But a few months ago, it stopped being a laughing matter.

When my wife became pregnant, nature dictated that she had to get up more frequently during the night to go to the bathroom. She began to notice, to her alarm, that in between snoring like a hacksaw, I stopped breathing for long periods. She managed to tape record this one night and the evidence clearly showed that I stopped breathing for a good 15-20 seconds at times.

I took the tape to Dr. Jonathan Murray, a local ear, nose and throat specialist. He explained that snoring usually occurs when the airway at the back of the throat constricts, causing air to be inhaled at an increased speed and pressure. This results in the soft tissues in the back of the mouth vibrating, creating the snoring noise. While most snoring simply disturbs other people and at worst can give you a dry or sore throat, he explained that heavy snoring like mine was a symptom of something potentially more sinister: sleep apnoea.

According to the American Sleep Apnea Association (apnea is the American spelling), the Greek word apnoealiterally means without breath. There are three types of sleep apnoea: obstructive (the most common), central, and mixed.

Obstructive sleep apnoea is caused by a blockage of the airway, usually when the muscles that support the soft tissues in the rear of the throat (the soft palate, uvula, tonsils and tongue) relax and during sleep. In central sleep apnoea, the airway is not blocked but the brain fails to signal the muscles to breathe. Mixed sleep apnoea, as the name implies, is a combination of the two.

With each apnoea event, the brain briefly arouses sleep apnoea victims from sleep in order for them to resume breathing, but consequently means a bad night's sleep.

The ASAA claims sleep apnoea is as common as adult diabetes, and affects more than 12 million Americans, with overweight males aged 40-plus like myself, at the greatest risk. Yet because of the lack of awareness by the public and healthcare professionals, the vast majority of sufferers remain undiagnosed and untreated, despite its serious and potentially fatal consequences.

Sleep apnoea obstructs the flow of oxygen to the brain and heart. It can cause high blood pressure and other cardiovascular disease, memory problems, weight gain, impotency, and headaches. Untreated sleep apnoea is believed to be responsible for job impairment and even car crashes.

To put it bluntly: every time I stopped breathing during sleep I was increasing my risk of a heart attack or a stroke.

MSN.com's Health Channel recently reported: Given recent data on the long-term complications of sleep apnoea, it is important for patients to treat the problem as they would any chronic disease. Simply trying to treat snoring will not treat sleep apnoea. Because of its association with heart problems and stroke, sleep apnea should be treated by a physician, ideally a sleep disorders specialist.

A rude awakening Continued from page 29 Locally, there are no firm figures although Dr. Murray's office alone tests about 100 poeple a year for serious sleep disorders. It's a lot more common than we think, he says.

After inspecting my obviously restricted airways, Dr. Murray arranged a sleep study whereby -much to the amusement of my nine-year-old - I had to rig myself up like Frankenstein to a monitoring unit that tracked my sleep patterns and movements.

The results were soberingly conclusive. The machine monitored, amongst other things, my oxygen desaturation levels which, in a healthy person, should not dip below 90 percent. Mine was below that figure for a staggering 40 minutes and 32 seconds and at one point dropped as low as 60 percent. It also recorded that most of my apneoas occurred when I was on my back - common among apnoea sufferers - and the majority of them were central and mixed. No wonder I registered a 15 on the machine's Apnea Index (anything over ten is cause for concern, apparently).

So what to do? Initially, medical advice for apnoea sufferers is to shed a few pounds if overweight, and stop or reduce smoking and drinking. While admittedly I could do with losing some weight, I neither drank nor smoked, so I had to look at other options.

I could have outpatient laser treatment to remove the uvula (that's the dangly bit at the back of your throat to you and me) and shrink the soft palate. More drastic but, in Dr. Murray's opinion, more effective, would be to remove my tonsils as well as the uvula and part of the soft palate -uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (or U3P for short)- thus removing all obstructions to my airway. It would also reduce the decibel level of my snoring and perhaps eliminate it all together.

My other option was a system called continuous positive airflow pressure, or CPAP, a bedside machine that supplies air pressure through a nose or face mask that prevents the tissues collapsing during sleep. Sleeping with this may have been safe, but as I figured it would not be as much fun for the wife, I opted for surgery. Which is why I'm sitting here a week into a regimen of Jello, sherbert, Lucozade and lukewarm chicken soup, where every swallow feels like broken glass, religiously downing my pain killers and anti-biotics. It's painful and uncomfortable as hell but you know what - I haven't snored once.

If that's what it takes to cure my sleep apnoea then it's a small price to pay. I know my wife will sleep a little easier. In fact, she'll sleep. Period.

If you snore heavily and suspect you may have sleep apnoea, consult your doctor or a specialist. For more information about sleep apnoea go to these web sites.

American Sleep Apnea Assocation: http:/www.sleepapnea.org Mayo Clinic: http:/www.mayohealth.org/mayo/9803/htm/a pnea.htm About.com:http:/sleepdisorders.about.com/health/sleepdisorders/msubsleepapnea.htm Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Trust: http:/www.1stopsnoring.co.uk/