Old_Newbie_first graph

[desipap]

Hi all. I just discovered this site a few weeks ago. I have been on CPAP for almost 10 years, with little success on my old machine. Once I discovered this site, I went ahead and got a new one so I could look at data. My prior setup: Resmed Elite II with F&P Simplus mask. This setup woke me up with tongue stuck to the roof off the mouth, maybe the heated humidifier didn't actually work! Additionally, often bloated with air when I wake up.
I just the Dreamstation with Dreamwear full face mask (I am a mouth breather). In the first two nights, at least no dry mouth and no bloated stomach. Big progress. Still not feeling fully rested...would appreciate a review of my data below. Thank you for the great forum.

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[palerider]

Hi all. I just discovered this site a few weeks ago. I have been on CPAP for almost 10 years, with little success on my old machine. Once I discovered this site, I went ahead and got a new one so I could look at data. My prior setup: Resmed Elite II with F&P Simplus mask. This setup woke me up with tongue stuck to the roof off the mouth, maybe the heated humidifier didn't actually work! Additionally, often bloated with air when I wake up.
I just the Dreamstation with Dreamwear full face mask (I am a mouth breather). In the first two nights, at least no dry mouth and no bloated stomach. Big progress. Still not feeling fully rested...would appreciate a review of my data below. Thank you for the great forum.


screenshot-20181229-112134.png

Things look pretty good, but there's room for improvement. I'd raise the minimum pressure a little, if I were you, see how it does at 7.

[desipap]

Thank you palerider. I will give that a try.

[desipap]

OK, tried the new setting of min. 7 mm. See below, my guess is that the minimum should be raised to 8.5? Just guessing based on the saw tooth pattern in the pressure graph.

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[Pugsy]

The saw tooth pattern is nothing more than the test pressure probes. They have no bearing on what the minimum pressure might need to be.

How was your sleep quality last night? I see at least one break in therapy....why?
Did you have more wake ups that you remember but didn't turn the machine off.

Do you know if your were maybe on your back 5:40 to 6:20? Awake or not?

[desipap]

The break is because I woke up due to dry mouth, I had forgotten to fill water. I turned it off to fix that.
Normally I sleep on my left side. I also wake up, naturally, around 4:30 - 5, then the usual tossing. I do remember rolling on to my right side in the 5:30 ish time frame and was having difficulty with the mask leaks.
Overall more restful sleep than the previous night despite fewer hours!
If its not the saw tooth pattern, curious how palerider concluded to increase the min. pressure. Trying to learn, not questioning.
Thanks for the help Pugsy.

[Pugsy]

Palerider was going more on the clustering of the obstructive stuff with the suggestion to increase the minimum pressure.
Not so much the AHI but the snores and flow limitations that you see that aren't part of the AHI.
Snores and flow limitations point to the pressure not quite being optimal. The airway is trying to collapse but with the AHI fairly low those tries to collapse aren't quite growing up to be full blown flagged OAs/hyponeas.

You can omit the snore graph in future images...make the events graph just a little larger and easier to read. Snores are included in the events graph so we don't really need a separate snore graph.

I would do a couple more nights with the new 7 cm minimum. See what happens when you hopefully don't have a known awake time to maybe cloud the event totals. With known awake times the chances for false positive flagging happening is increased.
Some of those flagged events right around the known awake time may not be real....meaning you may not have been asleep.
These machines only measure air flow (no way to know sleep status) and our awake breathing can and will confuse these machines sometimes.

Also...when you post your images of your reports...please include how you feel in general....in terms of sleep quality and how you feel during the day.
Numbers are just numbers without any context to them. The best most perfect numbers or charts don't mean squat if we slept like crap and feel like crap.

If you want to learn about SWJ sleep/wake/junk or awake breathing flags vs asleep breathing flags...go here
http://freecpapadvice.com/sleepyhead-free-software
watch the videos.
If you aren't asleep...flagged events don't count and more pressure won't fix them.

[palerider]

If its not the saw tooth pattern, curious how palerider concluded to increase the min. pressure. Trying to learn, not questioning.
Thanks for the help Pugsy.

Part of it is the saw tooth pattern.. but just it's presence... the more of those you see, the better your machine thinks you're sleeping, If your breathing is very nice and smooth and regular, then the machine does those pressure increases and decreases to "see if it can make things better" but... they're already great. machines a bit stupid in that respect, in my opinion.

As soon as your breathing is more ragged, when more pressure might help, the machine just sits there, doing nothing,

So, more spikes = better.

The other thing is that your machine is slow to respond to your needing more pressure, so you'll typically need more minimum pressure to control things, compared to a Resmed auto... thus, bump up the minimum pressure till you've got more spikes, and less clusters of events. Pugsy pretty well covered that, probably explaining my thinking better than I could