New to CPAP

[cpapnewbie]

Hello,

I have been reading this forum for a few weeks - great info and nice people.

I have been having a mental issue the past few years which has gotten worse - foggy feeling in my head, constantly tired, and trouble focusing. Over the past 6 to 9 months it started causing me to word block - I know what I want to say but I can't always get the words out. I think my issues have started out small and have started to snowball.

I tried hypnosis, accupunture and psychological testing. The psychological testing showed no issues - actually a pretty intelligent person! So they thought that I was suffering from stress/anxiety - probably true as my job is very stressful and in this economy everything is worse! Started me on Xanax - I told them that it was useless. Now they have me on Zoloft which does seem to help somewhat but I am still not rested. I had my primary doctor test my blood for everything - thyroid, vitamin deficiencies, etc - everything came back fine. He mentioned that I might want to try a sleep study due to my complaints of being tired, the fact that I snore and that sometimes I wake up with night sweats.

I did the sleep study - came back with one apnea event an hour if I remember correctly so that wasn't a big issue. But my doctor did say that I continuously snored and that it caused 57 arousal events per hour - never allowing me to fall into a deep sleep. He suggested that I do Phase II of the sleep study with trying the mask. I did that about 2 weeks ago and got my results today. He said that with the mask my arousal events dropped to 10 and that while I was in light sleep the mask pressure was 7 and when I hit REM it was 11. He is prescribing an APAP machine set at these levels. I asked if it was fully data capable and he said yes. He said that he is prescribing the Resmed Quattro Full Face Mask. My DME should contact me in the next day or two to arrange delivery and a training session.

My doctor did say that Zoloft can limit the amount of REM sleep that one can get but he didn't tell me to stop it. If I think sleep is my issue it might make sense to ween myself off of it and just do APAP.

My question - is there anything else that I should be aware of or does the course of action sound reasonable? I didn't know that just snoring could create such havoc. Any others with similar issues? Thanks in advance.

[Muse-Inc]

I had very few apneas and a lot of hypopneas so many that I was diagnosed as 'severe.' Sleep is very important to health; basically, poor sleep=poor health. Sleep is critical to memory because short-term memories are turned into long-term ones during sleep. Interfere with sleep and memory suffers.

[kteague]

Don't know how much you slept the night of the first study, but if you didn't sleep much or get REM sleep while supine, consider the possibility that the apneas and hypopneas may have been higher in those circumstances. The titration seems to indicate cpap has a real value for you in preventing arousals. I have a rip-roarin-snorin friend whose sleep study said they didn't have OSA, yet they had all the symptoms, so apparently snoring can severely disrupt sleep. Someone posted an article on this topic a while back, and if I remember correctly, snoring is recognized as being detrimental to sleep in some.