Sleepyhead flow rate

[garyjack]

Can anyone offer any advice on the spikes that occur throughout the night on the flow rate chart. Are these just a change of position maybe? They seem to occur with an increase in flow limitation. My AHI is excellent, usually under 1.0 but still feeling fatigued during the day.

[Jay Aitchsee]

Those look like periods of arousal, which are normal. They are probably not the reason for your fatigue, given your low AHI. You might do well to google, study, and implement good "Sleep Hygiene" precepts. Your SleepyHead charts posted earlier looked fine, at least to me.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174268&p=1283259#p1283254

Sleep disordered breathing is only one of many causes of fatigue and non-restorative sleep.

[Pugsy]

I agree ....just some arousal breathing. You woke up (may or may not remember it) and just your normal irregular breathing (irregular when compared to asleep breathing) and it didn't last very long at all and you went back to sleep.
The breathing prior to the arousal doesn't appear to be reduced or restricted either...like maybe a 9 second something that didn't earn a flag causing the arousal.

I doubt these rather brief arousals are the cause of fatigue. They are actually a part of the normal cycle of things in terms of sleep.

Now if you see extremely large numbers of these sorts of arousals throughout the night then that might mean poor sleep quality...and the poor sleep quality itself might be a factor. As to what might be causing them....most likely they are what gets called spontaneous arousals which unfortunately is not so easy to figure out the cause much less fix it. The get the spontaneous label because no outward reason can be see for them happening.....Don't know the cause and it's hard to fix a problem when you can't put a name to the problem.

10 of them isn't extremely large number...20 isn't either...neither is 30...maybe not even 40 or 50 (depends on the time asleep kind of thing)...30 in 2 hours....bad. 30 in 8 hours..not bad... kind of thing.
Plus we have to factor in duration...brief vs 20 minute kind of thing.
We are talking LOTS and LOTS of them to the point that flow rate has just about as much arousal breathing as sleep breathing kind of thing.

I am with Jay....start looking elsewhere for the causes of fatigue or unwanted symptoms.
Your OSA side of your problem is well treated.
Now maybe you just need to "give it time" but while "giving it time" it hurts nothing to do some detective work trying to figure out why we don't feel so great despite getting some pretty darn good software reports from our machines.

As for the potential correlation with flow limitation...I don't see the FL being big enough prior to the arousal breathing to most likely have caused it...and sometimes the slight increase in FL comes afterwards.
Only thing that I can remotely think about in that area...any chance you are having any nasal congestion that might be intermittent??
I don't sleep so great if I have nasal congestion in the slightest amount. It's just the way I am. It's why I don't use certain masks that are known to actually cause congestion for me...I simply can't sleep well when I have to continually adjust a mask so that the congestion (which wakes me up) goes away briefly only to return.

[garyjack]

Many thanks for that. Funnily enough I do have worse nasal congestion during the winter months and was considering using my neti pot again to try and clear it. Great to have some knowlegeable people on here to make things clearer

[Pugsy]

When you have time...please fix your equipment profile...you have the wrong machine chosen.
If you think you can't find your machine and it's the AirSense 10 AutoSet....look down in the R section. For some reason it got stuck down there and isn't up with the As.

Sometimes the machine will interpret nasal congestion as a flow limitation...there's a reduction in air flow...the machine doesn't know where..it only knows there is a reduction in air flow somewhere...so you get a flow limitation flagged.
Nasal congestion FLs...won't be fixed with the more pressure thing...instead we have to address the cause of the congestion by whatever means works.

[palerider]

Another vote for "you just woke up briefly" for whatever reason.... (there's no indication in those bits of data as to why)