After losing 150 pounds?

[Pugsy]

I take it I have a leak problem. Any help is appreciated.

Are leaks waking you up?
If not...those times in large leak are very minor and one was obviously a mask off leak...I wouldn't bat an eyelash over that little bit of leak UNLESS it was waking me up.

Any leak..no matter how big or small that wakes us up is unwanted.
I sleep through worse leaks than yours almost every night...don't even bat an eyelash over them.

[projecttoday]

Is there some way to know if you've been awakened by a leak? I can sleep up to 7 continual hours with the CPAP, though it's usually less than that (in which case I usually go back to bed / take a nap later on).

Thanks.

[Pugsy]

Sometimes it's not so easy to know why anything wakes us up...and I have slept through some massive leaks and woke up to a tiny bit of air blowing on my cheek. Go figure.

What you can do is when you do wake up reach over and turn the machine off and back on again..This will create a break in the therapy line so you can see what might have been going on when you woke up.
Then you can look to see how much leak might have been happening at the time and maybe be able to make an educated guess.

[projecttoday]

Will do.

But overall do the stats indicate that I am still suffering from severe OSA?

[zonker]

Will do.

But overall do the stats indicate that I am still suffering from severe OSA?

i know you asked pugsy and i'll let her answer that. i'm to the point where terms like severe and mild osa don't mean much to me.

but according to your chart that you last posted, your ahi is still pretty high. just to give you an example, most of us here like to have our ahi around 1 and some even less.

but having a low ahi doesn't necessarily mean you have slept well. more depends on how you feel in the morning. my ahi last night was 0.56, which meant i had very few events. but my sleep wasn't so good! i woke up many times during the night. so this morning, i had a bit of a headache.

so keep working at it and follow pugsy's advice. she knows from whence she speaks.

good luck!

[Pugsy]

Assuming you were asleep when all those apnea events got flagged on the last report you shared...yes, I believe that you still have some OSA going on.
Degree or severity is impossible to measure with the machine data available because there is therapy value even at 4 cm fixed pressures.

Now if you were having nice clean reports with random OAs/hyponeas events flagged (AHI sub 1.0 consistently)...we could maybe talk about no OSA with more enthusiasm.

Maybe the 4 cm minimum is preventing a truckload of events and the remaining AHI you see is just what it can't deal with at this minimal pressure.
Maybe the AHI you see is what you would have with no pressure at all being using.
We just have no way of knowing for sure from the data we have available.
You really need a sleep study without any cpap pressure at all to know for sure. Sorry, I know what you were hoping to hear but we just don't have enough information to know for sure.
Would you only have an AHI of 3 ish if you didn't even use the machine???? Don't know and no way of knowing without another sleep study without the machine.

If I were placing bets though...I think the weight loss helped reduce the pressure needs significantly but I am still seeing more events being flagged than I would want to see if it were my reports...I don't think the weight loss totally eliminated the OSA.

[projecttoday]

That's sounds fair enough Pugsy, zonker, and anyone else still following. So is the 4cm to 20cm setting okay?

[Pugsy]

To be clear...if that were my report I would increase the minimum to maybe 6 or so and see what happens.
There are more apnea events slipping past the defenses (assuming you were asleep) than I would want to see on my report.
I would proceed with dealing with them the way I would normally deal with them until proven to me that what I saw was the worst it would be...as in without cpap at all.
If I had an AHI of 3 ish...without cpap...I probably wouldn't be using cpap unless there was something else going on that was making a big impact.