Pregnancy Rhinitis: The Hidden Risks of Snoring While Pregnant

How pregnancy Affects Your Nose

Somewhere around your second trimester, you may notice you can’t breathe through your nose. Not from a cold. Not from allergies. Just — suddenly — congested. You start snoring for the first time in your life. You wake up with a dry mouth, a sore throat, and the bone-deep tiredness that no amount of pregnancy pillow rearranging seems to fix.

It has a name: pregnancy rhinitis. It affects up to 39% of pregnant women, can persist for the last six weeks or more of pregnancy, and most obstetric textbooks treat it as a minor inconvenience.

It isn’t.

The research over the last fifteen years has linked pregnancy-related nasal congestion to a cascade of much more serious problems — from snoring and disrupted sleep all the way to gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, and adverse outcomes for the baby. This is the article most pregnant women never get handed at their 20-week appointment. Here’s what the science actually says, what the warning signs are, and what you can safely do about it.

Pregnant woman sleeping peacefully wearing Intake nasal dilator

What pregnancy rhinitis actually is

Pregnancy rhinitis (sometimes called gestational rhinitis) is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as nasal congestion, runny nose, or other nasal symptoms that develop during pregnancy, last for at least six weeks, and resolve completely within two weeks of delivery — with no underlying allergy, infection, or structural cause.

It’s driven by hormones, not pathogens. Rising estrogen and placental growth hormone cause the blood vessels lining your nose to dilate and the mucosal tissue to swell. Increased blood volume during pregnancy adds to the congestion. The result is a nose that feels permanently stuffy, especially when you’re lying down at night.

It’s strikingly common. A landmark Swedish population study of 599 pregnant women found a gestational rhinitis prevalence of 22%. A more recent narrative review in 2025 found the prevalence ranged from 9% to 39% across studies, with a Polish cohort reporting that 39% of women between 13 and 21 weeks of gestation had symptoms consistent with pregnancy rhinitis. One Swedish study even found that 42% of women reported nasal stuffiness in the 36th week of pregnancy.

This is not a fringe complaint. It’s a near-universal pregnancy experience that medicine has only recently started taking seriously.

Up to 39%of pregnant women develop pregnancy rhinitis — persistent nasal congestion with no allergy or infection.

Why “just a stuffy nose” isn’t just a stuffy nose

Here’s where the conversation gets serious. When your nose is blocked, you stop breathing through it. Your body defaults to mouth breathing, which is dramatically less efficient at humidifying air, regulating airflow, and supporting deep, restorative sleep stages. And mouth breathing during sleep produces something most pregnant women don’t expect to start doing — snoring.

The numbers on snoring during pregnancy are startling. Longitudinal data shows that the rate of habitual snoring rises from 7–11% in the first trimester to 16–25% in the third trimester. A separate 469-woman study found habitual snoring jumped from 2.5% pre-pregnancy to 11.9% in the third trimester — a near five-fold increase. A landmark study published in Chest found 23% of women snored every night in their last week of pregnancy — compared to just 4% before becoming pregnant.

Snoring isn’t just noise. It’s the audible symptom of a partially obstructed airway. And during pregnancy, it’s the leading clinical marker for sleep-disordered breathing — a condition with serious downstream consequences.

The preeclampsia connection

This is the part that should be in every prenatal pamphlet and isn’t.

In a landmark 2012 prospective cohort study of 1,719 pregnant women by Louise O’Brien and colleagues at the University of Michigan, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, researchers found that new-onset snoring during pregnancy — not pre-existing snoring — was independently associated with significantly higher rates of two of the most dangerous pregnancy complications:

  • Gestational hypertension — odds ratio of 2.36 (women who started snoring during pregnancy were more than twice as likely to develop high blood pressure)
  • Preeclampsia — odds ratio of 1.59 (a 59% higher risk)

The researchers concluded that as much as 19% of hypertensive disorders during pregnancy could potentially be ameliorated through treatment of underlying sleep-disordered breathing. That’s a public health number. Hypertensive disorders affect roughly 10% of all pregnancies and are responsible for over 60,000 maternal deaths annually worldwide.

An earlier prospective study published in Chest found that preeclampsia occurred in 10% of habitual snorers vs. 4% of non-snorers, and that infants of snoring mothers were nearly three times as likely to be small-for-gestational-age. A 2014 University of Michigan cohort study found that 41% of pregnant women with hypertensive disorders had obstructive sleep apnea on polysomnography — compared to 19% of normotensive women.

The mechanism is what you’d expect: when nasal congestion forces you into mouth breathing and shallow, fragmented sleep, your airway partially collapses repeatedly through the night. Each event drops your oxygen, spikes your blood pressure, and stresses the cardiovascular system that’s already working overtime to support a pregnancy.

2.4xhigher risk of gestational hypertension in women who start snoring during pregnancy.

What sleep deprivation does to a pregnant body

Even when sleep-disordered breathing doesn’t escalate to preeclampsia, the everyday cost of poor sleep during pregnancy is enormous — and it compounds.

A comprehensive review in Sleep Medicine Reviews documented that sleep deprivation during pregnancy is associated with measurably increased risk of:

To be clear about the chain of causation: pregnancy rhinitis causes nasal obstruction. Nasal obstruction causes mouth breathing and snoring. Snoring is the audible symptom of sleep-disordered breathing. Sleep-disordered breathing is associated with hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, longer labor, and postpartum depression. Each link in that chain is documented in peer-reviewed literature.

The good news: that chain can be broken at the very first link.

What you can (safely) do about it

The treatment options for pregnancy rhinitis are limited — and that’s a deliberate, conservative approach because most nasal medications carry pregnancy risk classifications.

What’s generally considered safer: saline rinses (neti pots, saline sprays), positional changes (sleeping on the left side, head slightly elevated), nasal humidifiers, and gentle exercise to support nasal blood flow.

What requires caution: The Cleveland Clinic and most ENT guidelines warn against extended use of decongestant sprays like oxymetazoline (Afrin), which can cause rebound congestion if used for more than a few days. Oral decongestants like pseudoephedrine carry a Category C FDA classification — case-control studies have shown statistically significant associations with certain birth defects when used in the first trimester. Always talk to your provider before using any medication.

This leaves a real gap. Most pregnant women are told to ride it out — even when riding it out means snoring through the night, sleeping poorly, and (per the research above) facing measurably elevated risks.

That’s where mechanical, drug-free interventions come in.

Intake nasal dilator close-up showing the magnetic band design

How Intake helps — without medication, without compromise

Intake is an external nasal dilator: a reusable magnetic band with disposable adhesive tabs that anchor on the sides of your nose and gently hold your nasal passages open from the outside. There’s no medication. Nothing goes inside your nose. No bridge pressure, no internal hardware, no systemic absorption. It opens the airway at the nasal valve — the narrowest part of your airway and the spot most affected by pregnancy-related swelling — so air can move freely the way it’s supposed to.

For pregnant women, that translates into a few specific things:

  • Less mouth breathing. When you can breathe through your nose, you do.
  • Less snoring. Open nasal passages reduce the airway turbulence that produces snoring noise.
  • Better sleep quality. Nasal breathing supports deeper, more restorative sleep stages than mouth breathing.
  • No medication tradeoff. Because Intake is mechanical, there’s no fetal exposure to active ingredients.

To be straightforward: Intake doesn’t treat preeclampsia or gestational hypertension. It’s not a medical device for sleep apnea. If you have severe symptoms, persistent loud snoring, or witnessed breathing pauses, you should be evaluated by your OB and possibly a sleep specialist for formal testing — CPAP is the gold-standard treatment for pregnancy-related sleep apnea, and it’s safe.

What Intake does do is address the upstream problem — nasal obstruction — that pushes so many pregnant women into mouth breathing, snoring, and fragmented sleep in the first place. It’s the simplest intervention you can make. And for most women, it’s the one that gives sleep back.

What pregnant women say

The reviews from women who used Intake during pregnancy are some of the most consistent we receive. A few examples:

“My husband ordered me this. It arrived yesterday and I slept with it on last night. I felt so good I wore it through my workday — no runny nose, no sinus congestion, no sniffles. In less than 24 hours I feel a thousand times better.”

— Liza L., Verified

“I’m waking up feeling well rested — which is critical when you’re a mom to a toddler and pregnant with a second!”

— McKenzie M., Mom + Expecting, Verified

“I started wearing these and immediately slept better. My husband told me my snoring was quieter, which he was very happy about.”

— Cheryl, Verified Customer

The bottom line

Pregnancy rhinitis is real, common, and underestimated. Up to four in ten women will experience it. For many, it produces snoring, mouth breathing, and the kind of fragmented sleep that the research has now firmly tied to elevated risks of gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, longer labor, and postpartum depression.

You shouldn’t have to choose between safe medication and sleep. The good news is you don’t. A clear nose is the foundation of good sleep, and good sleep is the foundation of a healthy pregnancy. Intake is one of the simplest, safest ways to get your nose open and keep it that way.

If you’re snoring for the first time in your life, waking up exhausted no matter how many hours you slept, or just struggling to breathe through your nose at night — you’re not imagining it, and it’s not nothing. Talk to your OB. Pay attention to the symptoms. And give your nose the help it needs.

Learn More About Intake for Pregnancy

Sources

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