• Posted August 12, 2025

Conch Blowing Could Be Effective Treatment For Sleep Apnea

Want to ease your sleep apnea and get a better night’s sleep?

Blow through a conch shell, a new pilot clinical trial says.

Regularly blowing through a conch shell (shankh) for six months, like Disney princess Moana or Anchorman legend Ron Burgundy, significantly improved sleep among a small group of people with sleep apnea.

Patients blowing a conch slept better, felt more alert during the day and had fewer breathing interruptions at night, researchers reported.

Conch blowing might prove a reasonable alternative to using a continuous positive air pressure (CPAP) machine, in which a face mask blows air to keep a patient’s airways open while sleeping, said lead researcher Dr. Krishna Sharma, director and head of pulmonology at the Eternal Heart Care Center and Research Institute in Jaipur, India.

While CPAP is the gold standard treatment for sleep apnea, many patients find it uncomfortable and noisy.

“For people living with obstructive sleep apnea, especially those who find CPAP uncomfortable, unaffordable, or inaccessible, our findings offer a promising alternative,” Sharma said in a news release. “(Conch) blowing is a simple low-cost, breathing technique that could help improve sleep and reduce symptoms without the need for machines or medication.”

Blowing a conch shell, also called shankh blowing, has been part of Indian culture for thousands of years, he explained.

“In my clinical practice, several patients reported feeling more rested and experiencing fewer symptoms after regularly practicing shankh blowing – a traditional yogic breathing exercise involving exhaling through a conch shell,” Sharma said.

Based on these anecdotes, Sharma and colleagues designed a small clinical trial to see if the simple, ancient practice might help people with sleep apnea.

In sleep apnea, a person stops breathing repeatedly during the night because their airway collapses, causing them to wake. Sleep apnea patients often snore loudly, and have a higher risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.

Researchers think conch blowing might help by exercising the muscles of the airway.

“The way the shankh is blown is quite distinctive. It involves a deep inhalation followed by a forceful, sustained exhalation through tightly pursed lips,” Sharma said.

“This action creates strong vibrations and airflow resistance, which likely strengthens the muscles of the upper airway, including the throat and soft palate – areas that often collapse during sleep in people with obstructive sleep apnea,” he continued. “The shankh's unique spiraling structure may also contribute to specific acoustic and mechanical effects that further stimulate and tone these muscles.”

Researchers recruited 30 people with moderate sleep apnea and randomly assigned 16 to practice blowing through a conch shell. The other 14 were taught a deep breathing exercise.

All participants were encouraged to practice either conch blowing or deep breathing for a minimum of 15 minutes a day, five days a week.

After six months, the people armed with conch shells were 34% less sleepy during the daytime than those practicing deep breathing, results show. They also reported better sleep.

Sleep lab tests showed that those blowing a conch shell experienced on average four to five fewer episodes during the night in which they breathing stopped during sleep, as well as higher oxygen levels during sleep.

“This is a small study, but we are now planning a larger trial involving several hospitals,” Sharma said. “This next phase will allow us to validate and expand on our findings in a broader, more diverse population and assess how shankh blowing performs over longer periods.”

Future studies also will test to see how conch blowing affects the muscle tone of the airways, and compare the practice directly against standard treatments like CPAP, Sharma said.

Sophia Schiza, head of the European Respiratory Society’s group on sleep-disordered breathing, reviewed the findings. She said conch blowing might fill a need for more treatments for sleep apnea.

"This is an intriguing study that shows the ancient practice of shankh blowing could potentially offer an obstructive sleep apnea treatment for selected patients by targeting muscles training,” Schiza said in a news release.

“A larger study will help provide more evidence for this intervention which could be of benefit as a treatment option or in combination with other treatments in selected obstructive sleep apnea patients,” added Schiza, a professor of pulmonology and sleep disorders at the University of Crete in Greece.

The new study appears in the journal ERJ Open Research.

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on sleep apnea.

SOURCE: European Respiratory Society, news release, Aug. 11, 2025