Can stress make AHI's increase?

My apneas have been really well controlled since starting CPAP two months ago. AHI has regularly been 1 or under most nights. The numbers are still good but have almost tripled over the past few days. I'm not doing any thing differently but I have been under more stress due to going through escrow with my home. My question is can added stress play out in increased AHI's?

In my opinion, yes.

When I am stressed out or nervous about something, my AHI goes up. I notice more breathing instability when falling asleep, which usually shows more hypopneas when I look at my data. I think most of it is central in nature.

It seems as long as I stay under an AHI of 2 my symptoms are resolved but any thing over 2 they all come raging back, ie. headaches, numb feeling in my feet, tired during the day, fog etc. Hope this trend doesn't continue.

I agree....Under stress you most likely will be more restless at night and may incur more hypopnias and clear airway events.

I'm still fairly new to CPAP and being able to actually track my data now but my thought is probably yes to some extent. It'd be an interesting experiment to perhaps note how we feel before going to bed in a journal and then plot that against our machine data. Hmmm.....

Logies101 wrote:My apneas have been really well controlled since starting CPAP two months ago. AHI has regularly been 1 or under most nights. The numbers are still good but have almost tripled over the past few days. I'm not doing any thing differently but I have been under more stress due to going through escrow with my home. My question is can added stress play out in increased AHI's?

For me, historically, my AHIs have been higher when I was more relaxed and sleeping deeply. If I was more under stress and not sleeping as deeply, my AHI was lower. Since I retired nearly six years ago, I'm less apt to experience "stress".
But, everybody's different.


Den

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