Good question!
Good question! In this section PlusOnline goes in search of answers to nagging questions. This time: is it unhealthy to hold in your sneeze?
Sometimes a sneeze is inconvenient and you would rather try to stop it. Can it hurt to do that?
The answer is: Yes. When sneezing, a large pressure wave is created. If you pinch the nose, you stop that pressure wave and there is a lot of pressure in the blood vessels in the head and that is bad. That is what specialists from the independent treatment center ENT Van Linschoten Specialists say.
Because that air pressure then has nowhere to go, you run the risk of blowing out a weak spot in your skull, for example between the nose and eye socket. “There have been no major studies on it, but people who hold in their sneezes have been known to have a brain haemorrhage or become blinded by it,” he said. ENT doctor Jan van der Borden of the Amsterdam BovenIJ hospital told Trouw.
Dangerous
In 2018, things went quite wrong for a 34-year-old British man, so according to an article in BMJ Case Reports. He tore his pharynx (head of the esophagus) during a hard, restrained sneeze. The man, who had been healthy and fit up to that point, came to the emergency room with pain when swallowing and voice changes. This was after he tried to stop a hard sneeze by pinching his nose and keeping his mouth closed.
Rare
“You could also inflate your eardrums. Or even blow air into your brain, theoretically then,” Van der Borden told NOS about this at the time. Fortunately, the chance of that is quite small. “In my 29 years as an ENT specialist, I have never encountered this in a patient. In healthy people this will happen extremely rarely, because their tissue is strong. But if you get older, have congenital weak tissue or damage tissue by, for example, smoking increases the risk of injury.”
Elbow
So don’t hold back, that sneeze. And if you do sneeze, preferably do so into the inside of your elbow.
