Advice needed. Here's my sleep data.

I'm in a lot of discomfort. By most standards this sleep data is good. But I've found that if my AHI is close to 1.0, then I have a sick day following. Right now I'm almost a year into cpap. I started out on auto, and it was a disaster. But I quickly found settings that I have now kept for many months. I always have at least one or two episodes of apnea and hypopnea per night. I don't always have VS.

My question is, given the data here, what recommendations would you make for my machine setting? It seems that if I'm snoring my machine pressures are too low? I've forgotten.

All I know is I'm reaching a point where I simply can't take many more days like this. Confusion, slight headache, depression, fatigue, rage. I've had it. And that's why I'm posting here. I would greatly appreciate any advice. Given that my data doesn't look bad, I can't imagine what advice there is to give.

By the way, my snoring is always just after I go to sleep, for some reason.

I suggest an overnight Pulse Ox to determine what your O2 sats are.

If they are okay, then you need to see a high quality internist to determine other possible problems.

I did the pulse ox thing. That is most likely not an issue. I never dropped below 90% saturation.


As I study posts in this forum, I begin to wonder if my pressures might be too high. And I'm not sure how to determine or titrate in order to discover what is right. It's trivial, but there is probably a good way to go about it.

Compounding this is the fact that I don't have electric power. I'm running off battery. So it's hard to say if I'm really getting the pressures that are printed on the data. Those are just nominal figures, and not true real pressures. So I may have to just be patient until I get the power on to my property. A few more months.

Gregg, I started this post agreeing with jules' "go to a doctor", and then noticed your Nov. 2005 registration date - which made me view you older posts. I suggest you click on your profile, and reread all you posts since you joined this forum in Nov. 2005. And some of the to responses to them. You're still dealing with the same problems you had then - intermittent periods of feeling horrible interspersed with others where you feel great.

You never had a PSG.

Your oximeter observations, Dec. 2006:
viewtopic.php?p=133284#p133284

And yet, 7 months or so later you sold it because you'd been feeling so great - without any cpap therapy.

Perhaps you should do your own, systematic sleep studies at home, like ca_hosehead and tssleepy have done.

You may have breathing problem - the reason I say this is that when your machine was on auto, it reported flow limitation - and UARS is not necessarily accompanied by major oxygen desaturations.

Could you be having allergy/congestion responses? Have you tried nasal irrigation on a daily basis? That's a very low tech solution (http://www.neilmed.com) but it may help with your breathing.

Have you checked you nutrition? Do you eat a balanced diet? More specifically, might you be suffering from vitamin b12 deficiency which may cause debilitation similar to what your describing?

Have you considered food allergies?

O.

could it be a nasal turbinate or polyps enlargement that caused the flow limitations?
it seems that event the flow limitation increased you still have snoring as recorded from the chart.

mckooi

I really appreciate your replies.

I recently went to a local doctor who has prescribed Flonase. I don't see where it has accomplished anything. But it's hard to recall, or even quantify, how I've been feeling. It could be that the Flonase has helped.

I eat as well as is humanly possible. As soon as I recognized that I was not feeling well enough times that it came to my attention I stopped everything. No smoking, drinking, no ice cream, no coffee. No fun.

This started out as several episodes of moderately severe headaches. Perhaps a half dozen over a year. Then none for a couple of years. Then the amplitude of the severity began to decrease, and the frequency went up. Now I am at a low to moderate level of discomfort for maybe ten days out of a month. The last serious episode was the day after Obama's win, where I had a half bottle of champagne, and the next day was a living hell. What I see is a parallel to the anxieties I've been having in life. They all began about the same time. I'm extremely sensitive to noise, and I've lived in several places with night noise. And other things.

I keep thinking about central apnea. Or something similar where one simply doesn't breath. But now I'm just tacking a fairly educated stab at what I think it could be.

I have tried nasal irrigation, but not on a regular basis. I may just give that a concerted try to see where it goes.

Ozij, you post a lot of very carefully thought out things. Now I will have to go back over them and see what I can glean. I did work on my bi-pap pressures over several months, and did come up with my present pressures. And even though I have been on battery power, I checked my pressures, and they are accurate. I just don't think they have always been accurate the whole night through, due to battery voltage decrease during the night. But I think that's a minor detail in this discussion now.

I've always been super healthy, great sleep, highly athletic. If only it weren't so difficult to diagnose. I can't even figure out what kind of doctor to go to. The three or four I've been to have been completely worthless. I'm nowhere near a metro area with real physicians.

Well, thanks again.