non-responsive AHI - please help my dad

[wolewyck]

My father was fairly recently diagnosed with mild OSA, with an AHI of 11. He had been suffering from some symptoms, certainly, most especially including waking up with nasty headaches every morning.

He had a sleep study and was titrated to a pressure of 8. He got a CPAP and used it for several weeks, but there was little improvement in the AHI-- it was hovering around 10 or so. His doctor upped the pressure to 10 (apparently the residual events were still obstructive events, not centrals), and it's been a couple more weeks with still no improvement - 7-day average AHI is 9.7. Any suggestions for what may be going on here? Thank you!

[danimal71]

His story is very similiar to mine. My AHI was 11. I got the baseball bat headaches and very tired feeling. Is he experiencing any leaks? If he's compliant and not having any mask issues I would say call the Dr back. My pressure is currently a 12 and with the new mask I am currently between 2-4 ahi.

[davecpap]

My AHI was also 11.. At first while on CPAP my AHI stayed higher than I'd like - around 7-8. Then one day I stayed at a hotel with my CPAP machine and noticed my AHI was dramatically lower; for me, I found a new pillow made a big difference in lowering my AHI. Now my AHI is usually in the 1's or 2's. Does you dad have a guest bed or some other surface to try sleeping on to see if it makes any difference? Maybe something about the mattress/pillow/etc is negatively impacting keeping his airway open.

[Pugsy]

Looking at the 7 day average only as a source can be misleading. Would be better to look at a single night. Just from the law of numbers it takes more lower numbers to impact that 7 day number.

Same goes for the leak. How is the leak average?

Best thing would be to get the software and see the nightly reports individually to see what might be going on.
Sometimes "clusters" of a lot of events in a small time frame will give an overall elevated average. Clusters could be from a leak or something else.

Need to see the actual single night to be able to know for sure what is going on. Ran into this myself before I got the software. I was a REM cluster person.