Miss Emerita wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 12:10 pm
To the OP: I think you're making too many changes in quick succession to judge what does or doesn't make a difference to your sleep. Pick some settings and the other variables you've changed, and then stick with them for a week. Sleep can be very different from one night to the next, so you need to be looking a trends, not data for just a night or two. When you make a change, make no other changes at the same time. That way you can isolate the effects of that change, if any.
It can be hard to have a subtle problem with getting restful sleep, but I worry that you may be going down too many rabbit holes. For that reason, I wouldn't recommend video-ing yourself during your sleep.
Ahh that is a fair point... truthfully, I am getting very impatient since I just want my life back. I want to create a startup before the summer (since that is the relevant season for this market) and am rushing to find a solution before then. I feel like I am wasting away my 20s and it is very frustrating. I know having only 2-3 days of data per parameter combination is not ideal, but I feel like it is good enough if I can reason with a bit of uncertainty, and since I can always dive deeper on competing hypotheses that are discovered from the data by isolating parameters afterwards. Similarly, I feel like video-ing myself may really help me get more data points for my experimentation and am inclined to proceed with it. Sorry if it seems like I am just dismissing your points; I really do appreciate your input. I believe it is the correct advice for the majority of cases.
That being said, do you have any thoughts on what could be causing the sudden increase in OAs? I am losing some confidence in my dental retainers hypothesis since I have been going to bed without it recently but it is not changing.. Three other hypotheses are:
1. I have been eating late at night frequently for the past week or two. I was not measuring this, so I don't know if this was an every-day occurrence or just some days. Perhaps GERD or something could be causing events..? This is easily testable - I will not eat late at night for the next few days and see if anything changes.
2. The increased pressure is causing the increased OAs, somehow. The events tend correspond with an increased pressure, sometimes even to my max of 16 IPAP. The increased pressure tends to follow the events, so it is probably a symptom, not the cause. But perhaps it is a negatively reinforcing loop that is simply initialized by a minor change, such as the increased PS to 4.4 on 2/28. If this were true though, how come 2/28 and 3/1 were okay? And what would be the actual mechanism of increased PS causing obstructive apneas..?
3. Unbeknown to me, I have been sleeping in a new position that I have never done before that is causing the OAs. The OAs do look positional. But I highly doubt this since throughout my 7 months of PAP, I have never ran into this issue. What are the odds that my sleep position has never caused this in the past, and that some random change in sleep position beginning to cause this, consistently?
I am feeling quite sad since I really am not confident in any of my hypotheses... The most plausible to me would still be the dental retainer hypothesis - that the presence of the new bottom retainer and/or replacement of my top retainer has changed my tongue positioning, causing OAs. Yet me stopping this for the past few nights has not reversed it. One way to consolidate that fact would be that maybe my tongue has already adapted and learned the new positioning. Or maybe my teeth have actually shifted from my retainers in a negative manner. I don't know though..