Waking up after 5 hours, possible pressure issue

Hello everyone,

I have been using Resmed AirSense 10 Autoset since past 2 years. My min pressure is set to 9 and max to 11.

I lost about 20 lbs in the past 1 year and wanted to change my settings to see if my apnea became better. So five days ago, I changed both the min and max to 8.5. That night I woke up at 3 am and rest of the sleep was waking up frequently. Even before this change my morning sleep wasn't great but this night I was clearly waking up several times and felt awake throughout (even though I was lying in bed). Next night same issue continued. I noticed I was also having dry mouth

I realized the pressure change may not be working for me and changed it back to 9 and 11. Still I woke up at 3 am. Then I bought xylimelts for my dry mouth and tried sleeping but still woke up at 3 am past 2 days. When I checked in night a few times I noticed the pressure being used to be always between 9 and 10. Also my AHI has been between 1 and 2 before and after the changes. I notice though the AHI till 3 am is 0.3 and when I use it till morning with the half awake state the average AHI becomes 1.5

How can I fix my sleep issue

Try your max at 20, where most leave it unless they have a particular (generally rare) reason not to.

And after reading the sticky notes at the top of the forum download (free) Oscar and post results according to directions there. It's a terrific, comprehensive software that will tell you all you need about your therapy - experienced and knowledgable people here will help you interpret and suggest any necessary tweaks.

Thank you, here are my graphs

Read the instructions again... nothing posted here.

Sorry, can you look at this link? I can't see the embedding options even with a logged in account on imgur

https://imgur.com/a/UrinxuH

Welcome!

Your graphs show about 25% of your time you were in large leak. That may account for the dry mouth.
Check out the link in my signature for information about posting to this forum.
If you could, please put your machine and mask in your profile information. That will help us help you.

What mask are you using?

Chris

Much better - those who are good at interpreting will be around soon.

Hi Chris,

Updated my equipment info now. I use Airfit P10 Pillow mask. The leak has increased in the past 6 months; even when I ordered a new mask it remained high. Please let me know what I can do to fix it

I'm not one of the experts Julie is referring to, but I do see that the big contributor to your AHI is central apneas. These are events where you stop breathing for 10 seconds or more even though there is no obstruction in your airway.

It's pretty common for the central index to vary a lot from night to night, as yours does. And it's hard to know exactly what it means. Typically one thing it means is that the O2 levels have risen in your blood, causing your CO2 levels to drop, causing your brain to think you don't need to breathe. You stop breathing until the CO2 piles up again, then you start breathing once more.

Sometimes this sequence starts when you breathe more deeply than usual as the result of a mini-arousal. In that case, it's the arousal as much as the CA that's the problem, but it can be hard to know what causes the arousals. You can zoom in on a central and look at the flow rate to see if there's some deep breathing before the central.

Ideally, you could have a little arousal without compounding the problem with a central, which may just wake you up more. To see whether you can reduce your propensity to get into this cycle, you could try reducing your EPR from 3 to 2 and see if there's any difference. You have so few obstructive events that I wouldn't worry about compensating for this with an increase in your minimum pressure, at least until you see what happens.

You can't hurt yourself trying this change, though I would really like an expert to come along and see whether the idea makes sense.

Thank you. I am also having severe gum / tooth ache (down last molar) since the night I tried the pressure change. Not sure if they are related.

Also the ramp up pressure is 5 and is for 45 min; should I alter this in anyway?

Yes, try turning it off altogether- if your min. pressure setting is low (below 10) then 45 mins of gradual ramp to 'reach' that very low setting (of e.g. 5, 6, etc) is 45 mins of incomplete therapy... pointless, and wasteful. Most of us don't bother with the ramp at all.