As soon as she sat down in the chair, she began to talk incessantly, “Doctor, I only slept for two hours last night, and now I’m dying of pain, please prescribe me some sleeping pills so that I can have a good night’s sleep!” Dr. Wei hurriedly comforted her and said, “Don’t be anxious, talk to me in detail about your condition first, and then I will treat you.” Xuan Wei, a psychiatrist at Xiamen Xiangyue Hospital, found that Zhang’s sleep had been poor since menopause, and she often woke up at night and was not very energetic during the day. In the past few years after menopause, her sleeping condition has become even worse, and she feels like she is in a trance when she sleeps, as if she is not sleeping at all. Especially in the past six months, she found herself not only having trouble sleeping, but also snoring like thunder. What’s worse, as soon as she snores, she feels like her throat is blocked by something, she can’t breathe, her heart beats especially fast, like she’s about to suffocate, and she often wakes up. Once awake, she had to change positions to continue to sleep, after a long time to fall asleep. This night is a toss and turn, there is no way to sleep a peaceful sleep. The next day she woke up dizzy and weak, depressed, with a dry mouth and a particularly runny nose. In addition, because her snoring is really deafening, others can hear clearly through the door, she herself is even more noisy, and over time she found that she has a significant hearing loss. She said, snoring this problem for many years, but has not been paid attention to, they feel as if there is no impact on life, so they did not go to the hospital for treatment. Now, as snoring seriously affects your sleep and hearing, you want to go to the hospital. After talking about this, Auntie Zhang said, “Dr. Wei, I haven’t slept peacefully for a long time, it’s really too uncomfortable, just give me some sleeping pills, no matter what, let me sleep tonight!” Dr. Wei explained, “I can understand your feelings, but your insomnia is different from others, it is caused by snoring, taking sleeping pills will not solve the problem, but will worsen your condition. ” Zhang Da Ma agreed and had polysomnography done at Xianle Hospital that night. It didn’t take long for the test results to come out. Zhang’s sleep was really very bad, lying in bed for eight or nine hours, but the effective sleep time was only four hours. Because of snoring, she could not enter deep sleep and almost always slept lightly, and often woke up as soon as she fell asleep, waking up many times throughout the night. Sometimes it was hard to fall back to sleep after being awakened in the middle of the night, and it took her an hour or two to fall back to sleep. She snores for forty-five percent of her sleep time at night, and snores like thunder, and also has apnea many times. Dr. Wei said that there are few elderly women like Zhang Da Ma who have insomnia due to snoring and need to be taken seriously. In many people’s minds, snoring is a sign of a good night’s sleep, but it is not. When snoring occurs during sleep, it often indicates the presence of narrowing of the upper airway, which may even collapse completely to a certain extent, thus causing obstruction of the upper airway, or what we often call obstructive sleep apnea. It will further cause serious chronic intermittent nocturnal hypoxemia and sleep disorders. Medical statistics show that one in four elderly people who snore suffer from sleep apnea syndrome, which is the second most important sleep disorder after insomnia and is closely related to the occurrence of hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and respiratory failure. When obstructive sleep apnea syndrome occurs in the elderly, it is more common to have insomnia as the main complaint. With the increase of age, the physiological function of the elderly decreases, the responsiveness decreases, and the muscles of the upper airway gradually become physiologically relaxed, which makes the collapse of the upper airway more likely to occur. In addition, when apnea occurs in the elderly, they are more likely to wake up and thus have symptoms of insomnia, and are more likely to take sedative-hypnotic drugs for treatment and aggravate the condition. The reason for this is that sedative-hypnotic drugs can inhibit the respiratory center to varying degrees, thus aggravating the severity of apnea and hypoxia. Elderly people should not take sedative-hypnotic drugs for insomnia, but should go to a sleep specialist in a regular hospital for examination and treatment when insomnia is combined with snoring at night, so as not to miss the root cause of sleep apnea syndrome.