Leak rate too good to be true?

[Deneb]

I'm about to hit my third week of treatment, and I'm still trying to figure out what's best for me. I was waking up with bad gas pains, which the tech said must mean mouth-breathing, and she told me to wear a chin strap.

Now, I'm a bit confused by this assumption about mouth breathing. Wouldn't my machine be showing me a high leak rate if I was mouth breathing? I check the last night's stats on the LCD of my Autoset II every morning, and the highest I've ever seem the leak rate is 0.04L/s. Most days, it is 0.00L/s.
It's starting to make me suspicious. (I do have the mask setting set to Swift, so it should be doing the math right)

I tried the chin strap. It's horribly uncomfortable, and I didn't notice much difference sleep-wise. The only difference in my stats was my pressure reading going up by about 1 cm. (I usually read out as 9.6, but the first night with the strap was 10.

I'm trying to avoid provoking my doctor into insisting I wear a FFM. The gas pains, chin strap or not, have gotten better since the first few days. Not much pain now, just lots of "released air".

[Snoredog]

[quote="Deneb"]I'm about to hit my third week of treatment, and I'm still trying to figure out what's best for me. I was waking up with bad gas pains, which the tech said must mean mouth-breathing, and she told me to wear a chin strap.

Now, I'm a bit confused by this assumption about mouth breathing. Wouldn't my machine be showing me a high leak rate if I was mouth breathing? I check the last night's stats on the LCD of my Autoset II every morning, and the highest I've ever seem the leak rate is 0.04L/s. Most days, it is 0.00L/s.
It's starting to make me suspicious. (I do have the mask setting set to Swift, so it should be doing the math right)

I tried the chin strap. It's horribly uncomfortable, and I didn't notice much difference sleep-wise. The only difference in my stats was my pressure reading going up by about 1 cm. (I usually read out as 9.6, but the first night with the strap was 10.

I'm trying to avoid provoking my doctor into insisting I wear a FFM. The gas pains, chin strap or not, have gotten better since the first few days. Not much pain now, just lots of "released air".

[crossfit]

What is probably going on is actually aerophagia since your leak rate rules out mouth breathing. Honestly, from what I have learned here, I would have checked aerophagia before mouth breathing anyway. Look it up in the collective wisdom area as well as a search. There is also a thread going on right now. I am finding I get it a bit too but mostly it just makes me burp. So far no pains. But pains seem to be common.

[Deneb]

It was the RT's opinion that the air is swallowed in a response to the mouth opening during treatment, and air being blown into the mouth. I have read that it is either that, or air being forced down past the relevant flap.

I had already decided that it couldn't be about mouth breathing, but tried the strap just to see what it did. I am still curious why it brought my pressure up.

But my leak rate is so often 0.00 that I have begun to wonder if the machine is compensating for the mask incorrectly, or something else. As the title says, it seems too good to be true.