Blowing into a conch shell, a tradition embedded in Indian rituals, may help ease obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), reducing breathing pauses and bolstering daytime alertness, medical researchers said in a study released on Monday.
Their study, described as the first clinical evaluation of conch blowing, has suggested that the practice could be a low-cost approach to combat the symptoms of OSA — a sleep disorder that can be fatal if left untreated — without the need for medicines or medical devices.
“Training the respiratory muscles through regular conch blowing may be a novel treatment option for OSA,” Krishna Sharma, head of pulmonary medicine at the Eternal Heart Care Centre and Research Institute in Jaipur who led the study, told The Telegraph.
Global surveys suggest that between 9 and 38 among every 100 adults suffer from OSA. A 2023 study by doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, had estimated that 11 in 100 working-age adults in India have OSA defined as breathing disrupted at least five times per hour of sleep.
People with OSA often snore loudly, sleep restlessly, feel excessively sleepy during the day, and face increased risks of high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.
The current standard treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) involves a machine called the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device that keeps the patient’s airway open by blowing air through a facemask during the night. “It is effective, but many patients find it uncomfortable or struggle to use it as often as they need to,” Sharma said.
Blowing into conch shells is an ancient practice advocated for centuries in India, both as part of a yogic breathing exercise and an element during rituals. “But this practice has never been clinically evaluated for its potential impact on respiratory health — until now,” Sharma said.
Sharma and his colleague Rajeev Gupta, a cardiologist and public health specialist, decided to conduct a study on conch blowing after their anecdotal observations that some patients with OSA who engaged in conch blowing reported sleeping better during the nights.
In the trial, 16 OSA patients blew into a conch shell and 14 practised deep breathing, each for 15 minutes a day, five days a week, and were assessed after six months.
Patients who practised conch blowing were 34 per cent less sleepy, slept better, and had four to five fewer breathing disruptions per hour during sleep than the patients who practised deep-breathing, the Jaipur team reported on Monday in ERJ Open Research, a journal of the European Respiratory Society.
Sharma cautioned that the exact mechanism underlying the observed benefits remains a subject of future research.
“Blowing into the conch demands deep inhalation followed by a forceful and sustained exhalation — a person needs to maintain thrust throughout the period of exhalation,” Sharma said. “We believe these actions strengthen the upper airway muscles that typically collapse during sleep in people with OSA. But this hypothesis will need to be tested through more studies and larger samples of patients.”
Sophia Schiza, professor of pulmonology at the University of Crete in Greece, who was not involved in the Indian study, said that while CPAP and other treatments were available for OSA, alternative options were still needed.
“This is an intriguing study that shows that the ancient practice of conch blowing could potentially offer treatment for OSA for selected patients by targeting muscle training,” she said in a media release from the European Respiratory Society.
“A larger study will provide more evidence for this intervention.”