Sleepyhead / First CPAP night question

[marcnhl]

Hi guys,

Just did my first night. Used sleepyhead this morning. I was diagnosed with 7 events hr and 17 in REM in my lab study; had an AHI of 1 yesterday! Pressure at 8, fixed.

Since my lab study was a little bit inconclusive (slept 4hrs in all), I want to know if theres a way for me to know what WOULD HAVE BEEN my AHI without my machine last night....?? I get that with a fixed pressure of 8, everything is pretty much under control, but without anything, what would the AHI be like..? if it would have been 2 or 3 lets say, I would reconsider starting the treatment...especially since I feel more than doubled the fatigue this morning..!

Thanks!!

[Lazer1234]

Do not worry about what it would have been without, it is now your new life begins. Forget your old life before CPAP.

[SleepyToo2]

Hi guys,

Just did my first night. Used sleepyhead this morning. I was diagnosed with 7 events hr and 17 in REM in my lab study; had an AHI of 1 yesterday! Pressure at 8, fixed.

Since my lab study was a little bit inconclusive (slept 4hrs in all), I want to know if theres a way for me to know what WOULD HAVE BEEN my AHI without my machine last night....?? I get that with a fixed pressure of 8, everything is pretty much under control, but without anything, what would the AHI be like..? if it would have been 2 or 3 lets say, I would reconsider starting the treatment...especially since I feel more than doubled the fatigue this morning..!

Thanks!!

Welcome to our world! Do lots of reading, and you will learn a lot about what this treatment means for us. However, here are a few answers.

1. There is no way to know what your untreated AHI would have been had you not been using your machine. That is what the sleep study is for, so you can only guess at what that means on a day to day basis.

2. While some people feel a miraculous change from the very first night, for very many of us it takes a while. There is a thing called sleep debt that some people say has to be made up before we start to feel crazy better. This may be that the body needs to clear out all the "junk" that has accumulated while we were not sleeping properly. Once that is done, we can get on with the "normal" sleep that is restorative.

3. One night is not a good assessment of how good or bad our treatment actually is, which is why the first follow-up visit with the sleep doc is not until about a month after we started using the machine. There are lots of things that need to stabilize before we get a good picture of our sleep patterns/habits, all of which takes time.

So, congratulations on the completion of your first night, especially with such a low AHI! Keep doing what you did last night, and you will be successfully treating your apnea in no time. When things are not quite as they should be, or as you would like them to be, come back and ask questions. Someone will be happy to answer.

[jweeks]

Since my lab study was a little bit inconclusive (slept 4hrs in all), I want to know if theres a way for me to know what WOULD HAVE BEEN my AHI without my machine last night....??

Hi,

Being a numbers nerd, I find that to be a great question. I'd love it if my machine kept a count of every event that was successfully treated. About the only way I can think of is to try an experiment. That would be setting your machine to its absolute lowest pressure, run for a night, and see what your AHI is the next morning. The theory is that at a pressure of 4, most of your events would go untreated and be recorded by the machine. The only problem is that this is a horrible suggestion--you don't want to intentionally have a bad night of sleep just to do a "what if" scenario. Even worse, there is a thing called the "CPAP hangover effect" where once you start on CPAP, you get some of the benefits of the machine for a few nights after you stop using it. In this experiment scenario, you might have to skip 3 or 4 nights to get back to your pre-CPAP level of severity.

-john-

[robysue]

Just did my first night. Used sleepyhead this morning. I was diagnosed with 7 events hr and 17 in REM in my lab study; had an AHI of 1 yesterday! Pressure at 8, fixed.

Since my lab study was a little bit inconclusive (slept 4hrs in all), I want to know if theres a way for me to know what WOULD HAVE BEEN my AHI without my machine last night....?? I get that with a fixed pressure of 8, everything is pretty much under control, but without anything, what would the AHI be like..? if it would have been 2 or 3 lets say, I would reconsider starting the treatment...especially since I feel more than doubled the fatigue this morning..!

Without the CPAP your AHI would likely have been similar to the four hours during your sleep test: About 7 during non-REM and around 17 during REM.

Being a numbers nerd, I find that to be a great question. I'd love it if my machine kept a count of every event that was successfully treated. About the only way I can think of is to try an experiment. That would be setting your machine to its absolute lowest pressure, run for a night, and see what your AHI is the next morning. The theory is that at a pressure of 4, most of your events would go untreated and be recorded by the machine.

Nope. You can't make this assumption for all OSA patients. For some patients, 4 cm is therapeutic or pretty close to therapeutic. For others, 4 cm won't do anything at all in terms of preventing apneas. Because 4 cm can be therapeutic, it's not wise to assume that if your AHI < 5 when sleeping with only 4 cm of pressure that it's "ok" to ditch the CPAP because it's not needed.

Since marcnhl's titrated pressure is only 8 cm, it's reasonable to assume that 4 cm might well be enough to suppress some, but not all of his apneas. It's also quite possible that 4 or 5 cm might completely suppress marcnhl's non-REM OSA, but not be effective during REM.