Children whose parents snore have a three-fold increased risk of being noisy sleepers, a study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has found.
But U.K. experts said the link was likely to be related to families being obese, the BBC reported Monday.
The Cincinnati study, based on interviews with 681 families and published in the Chest journal, found children who tested positive for atopy, an early indicator for the development of asthma and allergies, were twice as likely to snore as those who did not.
Among the parents, 20 percent of mothers and 46 percent of fathers were habitual snorers.
Only 7.7 percent of children without a snoring parent turned out to be frequent snorers.
The study said it was likely an allergy-related respiratory disease was causing the snoring, but could not identify why the children of parents who snore were more at risk.
Professor Jim Horne, director of the Loughborough Sleep Research Center in England, suggested the family snoring link was because of obesity.
“Half of snoring is caused by being overweight, so it is likely that this could explain why this pattern has emerged,” he said.