Flow Rate Flat Spots

Hi Guys,

I've been using CPAP for a while now (couple of years) and have 100% compliance. I can't sleep without it, but I've never felt like it's worked as well as it could. I still wake frequently (3-4 times a night), and while I'm not as tired as I was before CPAP, and don't need bathroom visits, I still don't feel all that rested. I've noticed when trying to get to sleep sometimes that my breathing can be very shallow, and I end up becoming rather alert and inhaling deeply, as though I was short of breath. Recently a friend of mine recently switched to BiPAP after his doctor recommended it following a new sleep study... he described a similar situation to me.

Unfortunately I don't have a current doctor to monitor my CPAP treatment, but I am heading home soon, and intend to see the original specialist who set me up while I'm there. In the meantime, I thought I'd ask if anyone knows, based on the graph attached, whether it's likely I might need BiPAP to help too. The things that concern me are the flat spots on the flow rate, which indicate to me that I'm stopping breathing, or breathing very shallow.



My Stats & Info from SleepyHead:
CPAP Machine: Resmed S9 Autoset
30 Day Average usage per night: 08:09
Compliance: 100%
AHI: 0.31
Obstructive Index: 0.01
Hypopnea Index: 0.11
Clear Airway Index: 0.10

Average Pressure: 9.88
Max Pressure: 13.82

Has anyone ever spoken with you about periodic breathing or Cheyenne stokes breathe patterns? Anyone would want to see a few more graphs throughout a night of use on your CPAP unit. I don't want to say that is what it is, but your breathe pattern does have a resemblance, which could call for switch in the type of positive pressure therapy that you are using.

It hasn't been talked about, no. After looking that up on Wikipedia, it does very much look like the situation. Looking at the data for the rest of the night, there are several periods where the breathing follows the pattern shown in that original graph, and the CPAP isn't responding to it by increasing or decreasing pressure.

Perhaps I'll see if I can actually find a sleep centre locally to follow up with before I head home. I've probably got better insurance coverage here too.

Just had another episode and properly woke up with a minor headache and unable to doze off again. There's definitely something not working right, so I'm going to find somewhere to look into the problem first thing in the morning. Here's another graph of the event right before I woke up that I pulled off since I was too wide awake to get back to sleep.

My biggest concern is I probably won't have time to address the problem before I fly out on Saturday (won't be back for 5 weeks).

Why not post the full SH results page with all the graphs (tho' leave out the calendar).

Sure, here's all the various graphs around the time








I'm finally starting to feel sleepy again, and I've bumped up the min pressure slightly to see if that helps. The machine doesn't seem to think I had any apnea events, but that's a common issue with ResMed from what I hear.