suddenly cottonmouth

[allennosleep]

I've had my cpap now for 2 years and am doing great with it. The past 3 weeks though have been a bit odd. I lost a considerable amount of weight recently and all of a sudden I'm getting cottonmouth most nights. My first instinct was that perhaps the humidifier isn't working right on the machine. However, reading through the forums a bit it seems most people believe cottonmouth is only possible through mouth leaking. Now I use the nasal mask and would hate to have to move to a full face mask.

could my machine be the problem or is cottonmouth leak only material?

[knightlite]

I'm a heavy mouth breather but after reading this forum, I found some help. I practice holding my tongue to the roof of my mouth during the day . It seems to help and carries over to sleep time . I now have a lot less trouble with dry mouth with my full face mask . I am not cured but I wish I had known this therapy was possible 30 years ago. Maybe I should have gone to a respiratory therapist years ago-- still haven't , and I just realized I know one, I'm going to go ask her about this.
Good luck and hope the weight loss is a healthy one .

[DeepBreath]

I've had my cpap now for 2 years and am doing great with it. The past 3 weeks though have been a bit odd. I lost a considerable amount of weight recently and all of a sudden I'm getting cottonmouth most nights. My first instinct was that perhaps the humidifier isn't working right on the machine. However, reading through the forums a bit it seems most people believe cottonmouth is only possible through mouth leaking. Now I use the nasal mask and would hate to have to move to a full face mask.

could my machine be the problem or is cottonmouth leak only material?

I don't think cottonmouth is exclusive to a nasal mask, although I would agree it's probably worse. I get it to some extent when back sleeping with a full face, and jacking up the humidification leads to more mouth breathing for me. You might try playing with your humidity levels a little bit, too much or too little can cause nasal congestion problems for me and lead me to breathe through my mouth.

[Pugsy]

Any change in meds recently that might dry out the mouth more?

Oh...BTW...it doesn't take much mouth breathing to dry out the mouth. I do it sometimes myself...wake up with dry mouth and breathing through my mouth but when I go to look at the leak graph for that time frame sometimes it isn't but a tiny blip on the leak graph and sometimes I can't find evidence of it at all. On a rare occasion it goes briefly to large leak territory but that is rare and it never stays there very long.

I don't want to go the FFM route to fix maybe 15 minutes of maybe leak in large leak territory and as long as any other leaks from mouth breathing are below large leak territory line then I really don't care that it happened.
So evaluate your leak graphs to see if it might be mouth breathing and if it is big enough to negatively impact therapy to a large degree.