I assume that anyone who uses sleep medication should first try everything else, and then, if circumstances warrant, only use it briefly and for as short a time as possible. It's excellent that ChicagoGranny posted the rules of the road as a reminder. Daytime sleepiness is a common side-effect of mo...

I agree it will be a while before consensus emerges on this drug. Interesting article in the New Yorke r outlined how real efficacy is achieved at 20mg, but in order to get FDA approval, they had to recommend that people start with 10mg. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-big-sleep-2

Merck has just released a new sleep medication nationally to be available through prescription. It has "not been tested on patients with severe apnea."

If anyone has experience with this new drug, please share your impressions.

At least one of the reports on this important study quoted a participant who sought and used CPAP treatment. This was puzzling, especially since none of the articles about this report indicated whether any of the study subjects had treated their apnea. (They do conclude that in the future they will ...

What I am curious about - and none of the reports of this very compelling study indicate - is what is the increased mortality risk for CPAP users. It's clearly reduced from those with untreated apnea. Some skilled number crunchers out there might be able to infer the answer from this report: http://...

Noticed when I was thirty that falling asleep on my back sometimes made me stop breathing. When I was forty, I noticed that sometimes - a few times a year - I woke up gasping. So I slept on my side. When I was fifty, I began to wake up more and more often, gasping, while sleeping on my side. So I as...

Good cover story, Socknitster - I'm sure the jury will give it very careful consideration. And here I thought your name was about darning socks.... If I could get the damn smilies to work, you'd see .....

Get out your tape measures:

http://www.healthcalculators.org/calcul ... st_hip.asp

Yep, that was me.

Morpheus is the Greek god of dreams. Google the arms of Morpheus and you get over 300,000 hits - titles of books, paintings, an O Henry short story, etc. In family lore, it was just good old solid, restorative sleep, a trip to the land of Nod. Morphine was named after him. Me, I'm much more likely t...

Rosemary - Am I right in reading your chart to suggest that your have adjusted your max pressures for EPAP and IPAP up and down in large ways every few days? If so, I would suggest you start by moving your EPAP up to meet the 90 percent line and leave the rest untouched. Check your data after five d...

Going from a CPAP to A bi-pap machine worked for me - instantly and completely.

First, a disclaimer. I base this on my own experience and charts and pretend to no special expertise here. I find the pressure v. ahi charts interesting but not at all helpful in adjusting settings. I have managed to lower my AHI index down to about 0.3 as an average for the last week. But if you lo...

In several discussions here recently, people have been wondering about why OSA patients are more prone to have strokes and heart attacks. Here is a very recent study that may have part of the answer. And the very good news about the study itself is that it demonstrates that the use of CPAP reduces t...

I've had the personal bad luck to have my OSA be converted to CA's through - how to put this kindly? - medical incompetence. My sleep doc kept authorizing bumping up my set pressure from an initial titration of straight 7 to, ultimately over several years, a 6/19 bipap. I felt steadily worse, and I ...