“I can’t stay up all night and listen to her snoring. I have to be in office by 9.30 every morning. So I have to wake her up when she snores,” said Jayanta, a 35-year-old IT professional. “He snores too,” shot back wife Shyamali, 32. “But I don’t wake him up because I am more considerate.”

The young couple and many others attended a free health camp organised in the city recently to diagnose and cure snoring, besides creating awareness about the health risks associated with it.

The camp was held at the Medica ENT Institute, off the EM Bypass near Mukundapur, offering a ray of hope to those who snore and their partners who suffer through the night.

According to the institute’s records, 90 per cent of those who attended the two-day camp, including many from the districts, were diagnosed with sleep apnoea. It is characterised by pauses in breathing during sleep.

The patient gasps for breath at intervals while snoring. “It also accentuates diabetes, hypertension and obesity, and may even cause sudden death,” said Arjun Dasgupta, ENT consultant and head and neck surgeon at the Medica ENT Institute, the first specialised ENT hospital in the city.

Studies reveal that those with sleep apnoea have a 30 per cent higher risk of dying of a heart attack. The disease is diagnosed using an overnight sleep-pattern test called polysomnogram that costs Rs 6,000. Another test, called nasendoscopy, takes about 10 minutes and costs Rs 3,000.

“Snoring leads to regular squabbles between couples,” said Dasgupta. “We saw some couples who had come to our camp fighting while describing each other’s snoring.”

The good news is that both snoring and sleep apnoea can be controlled.

“People snore because there is a block in the nose, palate, tongue or neck, which results in the oxygen content in the blood going down,” said Ravi Ramalingam of the KKR ENT Hospital and Research Institute in Chennai.

“Such patients are asked to lose weight and use a gadget called Continuous Positive Airway Pressure or go in for surgery after detection of the block,” Ramalingam added.