Finally some data

Thanks again to the advice granted in my previous thread. Just wrapping up my second week on CPAP and thanks to the pointers and encouragement here, I'm feeling better and at least a little more comfortable with it. For one thing, bumping the minimum pressure up even just to 6 was a huge help, and enabled me to get to sleep a little easier. I'm also growing more accustomed to having the mask on. I'm managing about 4-5 hours per night on the machine, with a few spikes to over 6, and am slowly finding I am less groggy during waking hours. My sleeping schedule has been skewed for years, so I am working towards getting 8 hours. I dread bedtime a little less now, knowing I'm doing something good for my body and not worrying as much about the apnea or waking up throughout the night.

I wanted to take a look at the SleepyHead data, so I can start to get a grasp on what everything means. I chose Thursday night's data, which has a bit of a gap in it (took the mask off in my sleep). I plan to set up the alarm today so it wakes me up, as I don't want to lose therapy hours. So, big gap aside, here's how things looked Thursday.



I've also been reading through some of Pugsy's informative posts to understand some of this. It's a learning process. Seems like there are quite a lot of events clustered together at certain times. Any recommendations (aside from "don't take the mask off, dummy") to improve things?

I think I would gradually increase your minimum pressure to 9...but do it slowly. Increase by 1 every 2-3 days and see if your AHI doesn't drop. As far as clusters...you don't have any.

Maybe raise that minimum pressure up to around 8 to clean up the clutter and break up those clusters. Go slow if you need to. You might need a little more but if your other nights are showing the median around 8...that would be my first thought in terms of a little tweaking.

Next time you share an image.
The AHI stuff on the left...keep that but the graphs on the right you don't need all of those and when you try to get so many graphs on the screen shot it makes for tiny graphs.
So the only graphs we need on the right are
Events
Flow Rate
Pressure
Leak

No need to redo this one though....at least on my account.

When I started out only 3 months ago, I increased the minimum pressure by 0.2 per day. That way I hardly noticed the increase. I certainly noticed the improvement in my AHI and sleep quality.

Do Philips machines allow these small increases?

Now that my AHI is consistently below 1.0, I wait 7 days to make these small adjustments.

Pugsy wrote:Maybe raise that minimum pressure up to around 8 to clean up the clutter and break up those clusters. Go slow if you need to. You might need a little more but if your other nights are showing the median around 8...that would be my first thought in terms of a little tweaking.

Next time you share an image.
The AHI stuff on the left...keep that but the graphs on the right you don't need all of those and when you try to get so many graphs on the screen shot it makes for tiny graphs.
So the only graphs we need on the right are
Events
Flow Rate
Pressure
Leak

No need to redo this one though....at least on my account.

the new 'time at pressure' can be handy, too... if there's room.

cands wrote:When I started out only 3 months ago, I increased the minimum pressure by 0.2 per day. That way I hardly noticed the increase. I certainly noticed the improvement in my AHI and sleep quality.

Do Philips machines allow these small increases?

No. Smallest increment on the Respironics is 0.5 cm.

Thank you all. Pugsy. I'll be sure to expand the relevant graphs next time.

Cands, I'm tolerating 6 very well so I could probably make a jump right to 7, then a jump to 8 and maybe 9 if needed, as LSAT mentioned. I'm amazed at what a difference going from 5 to 6 made in my ability to fall asleep more easily. I'm sure acclimation to the mask played a part as well, but still.

I'm actually finding the Amara View mask is a little claustrophobic, even though it offers a wider range of vision than the standard Amara. My nose isn't covered by the mask, but rests on top of it. The strip that helps seal that portion is easily moved and I've found it blocks my nostrils at times, which forces me to breath through my mouth. I do that when I fall asleep anyway (hence the full face mask) but when this happens while I'm awake, it's harder to get to sleep. Might see about trying the regular full-face Amara mask.

thegrimmsleeper wrote:Thank you all.
Cands, I'm tolerating 6 very well so I could probably make a jump right to 7, then a jump to 8 and maybe 9 if needed, as LSAT mentioned. I'm amazed at what a difference going from 5 to 6 made in my ability to fall asleep more easily. I'm sure acclimation to the mask played a part as well, but still.

I'm actually finding the Amara View mask is a little claustrophobic, even though it offers a wider range of vision than the standard Amara. My nose isn't covered by the mask, but rests on top of it. The strip that helps seal that portion is easily moved and I've found it blocks my nostrils at times, which forces me to breath through my mouth. I do that when I fall asleep anyway (hence the full face mask) but when this happens while I'm awake, it's harder to get to sleep. Might see about trying the regular full-face Amara mask.

I too had great difficulty falling asleep with pressure of 5. I would start to drift off, immediately obstruct and wake myself up.
This eased as the pressure was raised. Once I was at 8 or so, I started to drift off relatively easily. My 'prescribed' pressure for fixed CPAP is 13, so 5 was obviously way too low.

The Amara View is tricky. Some days are great for comfort and low leaks and other days are relative disasters I still find it the best ffm for side sleeping as it is very forgiving for sideways pressure. I know what you mean about blocking off your nose. I have found standing in front of a mirror and ensuring the internal cross-piece is positioned correctly helps.
I know the instruction are to not have the mask too tight, but unless it is pretty tight my leak rate is too high.

Yesterday I decided to watch youtube videos of how to fit the mask. I followed the instructions carefully and had the highest leak rate last night for many weeks! (At least my jaw didn't ache and my AHI was a reasonable 1.0)

Good luck to you with your treatment.

Something to consider, re: the side sleeping. I do that quite often.

I grabbed last night's results. Went to bed late, but still got 6 hours in. Seems like last night's average pressure was a little higher. I also had a "clear airway" apnea (I noticed one in the previous chart as well). I'll be increasing to 7 tonight to see if that helps. In reviewing the earlier data, I've found that the pressure varies wildly every night. A few nights, it remained around 6-7 and some other nights it spent more time up around 12-13.

I'm curious what the significance of "periodic breathing" is. A stretch of irregular or abnormal breathing? What are some of the possible causes? It doesn't correlate with anything else on the chart.

Periodic breathing is just a specific pattern of waxing and waning of the air flow that lasts for at least 2 minutes.
Most of the time it means nothing of great importance. It can be worrisome if there is a lot of it especially if it is full of Centrals/CAs. Yours isn't and it really is nothing to worry about. It was relatively short lived and no events of any kind seem to be associated with it.

I used to get some PB flagged breathing when I was sort of semi awake for some reason. I just ignored it.

Unless you start seeing large prolonged blocks of PB I would just ignore it.