Mouth Leak

Hi all!

I am really getting used to my P-10 nasal pillow mask. It's comfortable and I don't want to try a hybrid at this point. The full face mask was not something for me either. My issue is a small amount of mouth leak. I sleep soundly for a good 6-6.5 hours a night without waking up. At about 5AM the mouth leak starts to wake me up. I got back to sleep then it wakes me up again (and this cycle continues until 7AM). To put it into perspective my leak rate is less than 8L/min and API 0.2-0.4 most nights. So the therapy is working very well.

My question to the community is at the 5AM mouth leak wake up call can I just call it a night and go to sleep without the mask? I would have at least 6 hours of solid therapy in. Does anyone else do this? If I feel good by doing this am I getting most of what the CPAP therapy is supposed to do? I use a chin strap and have no interest in taping, gluing, stapling my lips . I am just getting frustrated with the leak between 5 and 7 AM.

Thanks.

Ryan D wrote:My question to the community is at the 5AM mouth leak wake up call can I just call it a night and go to sleep without the mask? I would have at least 6 hours of solid therapy in. Does anyone else do this?

No.
If you do this and sleep until 7 AM you will have 2 hours of untreated sleep apnea sleep and guess what your body will remember?....yep, 2 hours of crappy sleep and you will feel like you didn't even use the machine the other 6 hours.

General rule...if you are sleeping you should be using the machine at all times.

That said, 6 hours is better than no hours of therapy but you won't find anyone here who will tell you it is okay to sleep the additional 2 hours without the machine.
You have 2 choices...2 hours of fragmented sleep because of the leaks or 2 hours of totally untreated sleep apnea sleep. With both choices you are probably going to feel like crap.
As time goes on you may get to where you can sleep through those small leaks....but if you get into the habit of sleeping for 2 hours without the mask at all...well that's a really bad habit to make and we all know that bad habits are easy to make and really hard to break.

If you don't want to do anything to limit those mouth leaks that wake you up....those are your choices.
Neither is a particularly good choice.

Thanks Pugsy. Great insight.