Can back pain/stiffness cause centrals/PB?

[NotLazyJustTired]

There's some risk of heart problems causing pain/stiffness and PB.

Probably nothing to panic over, but don't fall into the trap of blaming everything on apnea/CPAP.

My internalist did do an EKG recently and didn't find anything. But your point is well taken and I don't want to assume anything. The doc and I are going to talk about this in greater detail if this doesn't resolve itself in the short term.

[NotLazyJustTired]

Here's a naive/nubie question: How does one get/find the PB data? I use SleepyHead... Thanks for the help. p

The ResMed machines do not flag PB like the Resperonics machines do. I discovered it initially by zooming into the flow rate graph in an area where I had a cluster of centrals. It is the cyclical undulation of deep breaths to shallow breaths and back again. Sometimes there is an apnea event while the brain recovers from low CO2 levels and the process repeats. Short periods of this are pretty normal during sleep onset. In my case we are thinking that the back pain is waking me up and causing more sleep onset PB.

Here is an image I posted earlier:

[NotLazyJustTired]

We may be onto something with this working idea of the pain effecting my sleep quality. I took an Alleve just before bed last night. As you can see in the graphs below, the first half of my night was very clean until after 2 or 3am. Then towards morning it gets much worse as the pain returns. Even with the good sleep in the early evening my AHI was 5.7 and I am feeling it. My back was hurting when I got up as well. Maybe I should take another dose in the middle of the night until I get better?

[Pugsy]

We may be onto something with this working idea of the pain effecting my sleep quality. I took an Alleve just before bed last night. As you can see in the graphs below, the first half of my night was very clean until after 2 or 3am. Then towards morning it gets much worse as the pain returns

Yep, second half of the night looks a bit like "restless" sleep..what I call it anyway. I suspect you are correct in that the Aleve wore off and the pain sort of came back and made for a more restless night in general.
I see it fairly often and have come to the point that I don't really need to put the other stuff under the microscope because I already know what it is going to look like.
One night I woke up with extreme nausea but lay there in bed thinking about "do I need to run to the bathroom to puke or not"...didn't really want to...nice warm bed and all that. So I lay there thinking and doing some breathing that I tend to do when I am nauseated and fighting the nausea because I so hate to puke. I was awake a good 45 minutes I know for a fact.
Never did get up and finally the nausea subsided and I went back to sleep. That 45 minutes looked horrible on the reports.
Lots of CAs and the breathing sure looked periodic but I was using the S9 so don't know if it met PB criteria but I suspect it did.
It really didn't matter to me...I knew for sure I was awake and was having a problem and wasn't anything I could do about it.
Sure mess up my AHI though.

Here's a naive/nubie question: How does one get/find the PB data? I use SleepyHead... Thanks for the help. p

The S9 machines don't flag PB. You would need to have to zoom in real close using SH and know what to look for.
You can go to the events tab and open one of the categories of events and then click on one of the events to get a zoomed in version of the breathing pattern but unless the breathing is pretty remarkable and meets criteria for PB it is going to be difficult to spot.
NotLazyJustTired's example above is an extreme example of PB. Not all PB is that exciting.
PB itself is just a waxing and waning of the breathing flow that lasts for at least 2 minutes. Sometimes it's almost imperceptible to our inexperienced eyes. Sometimes it is like what is shown above.
It's normal for everyone to have some PB at times.
Unless it is rather extreme...I can't spot it on S9 flow rate. Heck I can barely spot it on the PR S1 machines sometimes and they flag it in green for me. It depends on just how remarkable the flow changes are.

If you have some large clusters of Centrals...and if you zoom in you may see some PB like breathing flow that is rather extreme...you may not. Even if it is PB appearing we don't worry about it unless there is a lot of it going on every night.
I had one a while back where I had 17 centrals in 17 minutes..all one right after another. It looked PB ish for sure. Pretty ugly. It was back last summer and I didn't zoom in real close and save an image or I would share it and I can't get to it now.
I don't know what caused it. I don't remember being awake during that time but I might have.
Since it is not someone I see on a regular basis...I just don't worry about it. Now if I saw it often then I would get excited and pay more attention but I just don't get too excited about rare whacko stuff that I can't explain. I try to save my time and energy for stuff that I can actually do something about if I need to.

PB doesn't always mean something horrible is going on anyway.

[pbb]

NLJT and Pugsy -- thank you for the explanation of PB. I, too, have zoomed in on SH Flow Rate data in a vain effort to understand what was going on, and sure enough, my data look similar to the chart you posted NLJT. I've wondered what it meant (the CAs occur to the left of the spikes, so symmetrical) and now I know -- periodic breathing. I have CA clusters, every night -- but mine occur with OAs interspersed as well and the clusters are often preceded by increased leaks. Just as reference, I live in the southwest at 6300 feet, but when I travel to sea level areas, my centrals go to zero, or nearly so. Pugsy, I'll be out your way soon, at Wash U for my niece's graduation -- my daughter attended there as well; good school. Thanks again for all your help; this forum has helped me understand so much. p