New cpap user with question

Hi everyone. I had a sleep study in October due to not sleeping well for a number of years and waking up tired. I never thought I would've been diagnosed with sleep apnea but it all makes sense now. About 15 years ago I had a uppp surgery while in the Marine Corps but that was only for recurring uvulitis. My uvula swelled up and stayed stretched out resting on the back of my tongue. That led to difficulty breathing. They never did give me a sleep study before doing the surgery. Anyways, this past October my sleep study showed an index of 8.1 per hour so it was pretty mild. My doctor just said to try and not sleep on my back. Come about January I got to the point to where I was constantly waking my wife up gurgling and gasping and even started waking myself up from the noises which I had never done before. I decided to go ahead and get a cpap machine hoping if anything it would help my wife sleep better. This past Wednesday night was my first night using it. It seemed to go pretty good. I think the pressure is set at 6/16. The app I downloaded that tracks my sleep and cpap use said I had 26.1 events per hour. Thursday was 21.7. Friday 32.5. Saturday 35.4 so the numbers were 4 times as high as they were just 6 months ago! As mentioned, this past October the sleep study showed 8.1 per hour. I do think my sleep apnea has gotten worse since then and, my wife agrees, but would it have jumped that high in such a short amount of time? Am I doing something wrong that could cause it to jump that high like maybe not a good enough mask seal? I feel like I'm wearing the mask right but just didn't know if something with the machine could cause a jump like that? I'm not sure if I should call the VA tomorrow or give it some more time until I get completely use to using the cpap. I'm tempted to just turn the pressures up a little tonight to see if the number of events go down. I'll call the VA regardless but is there anything wrong with trying that for a night or two? Any other advice is welcomed! I can't wait to see if using the cpap will lead to a good night's sleep one day.

Thanks for the help!

You can always try a little more pressure (1-2 cm) for a few nights to see if it helps - one night's not enough as anything can affect sleep one time.

The Amara has been said to leak a lot by some users... have you tried others - there are lots out there.

Julie wrote: ↑

Sun May 31, 2020 5:45 pm

You can always try a little more pressure (1-2 cm) for a few nights to see if it helps - one night's not enough as anything can affect sleep one time.

The Amara has been said to leak a lot by some users... have you tried others - there are lots out there.

Are you saying a leaky mask could cause my number of events to go up that much? Or, I guess my sleep apnea has gotten worse since October and a leaky mask just prevents the machine from taking care of them? I haven't tried another mask yet. I just started the cpap machine 4 nights ago. On Thursday the app said I had a good mask seal and even gave me a 20 out of 20 but I still had 21.7 events per hour. My mask seal wasn't as good on the nights I was in the 30's.

I might bump it up 1-2 cm like you said and see what happens before trying a different mask.

Actually I would like to see some real data before I would recommend any real changes in pressure.

Hopefully you don't have the machine you are showing in your profile and instead have a full data machine. Look on the front lower right face of your machine and tell us exactly what all the words are that you see. The VA doesn't normally dispense a non full data machine and what you have chosen in your profile is a non full data machine.

Let's not go making wild ass guesses about anything right now unless we simply have no choice.

OSCAR https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/
http://www.apneaboard.com/wiki/index.ph ... stallation
http://www.apneaboard.com/wiki/index.ph ... rpretation

Leaky masks....while they won't necessarily cause such a discrepancy in AHI and/or such an increase difference....leaks can cause a lot of false positive awake breathing flagging to happen. The machine only flags air flow or breathing....it has no way to know if a person is asleep or not and awake breathing or maybe fiddling with the leaky mask fiddling can cause what I call SWJ or sleep/wake/junk flagged events which are flagged and you aren't asleep. False positives so to speak.

Now...in the event you were really asleep and the AHI is indeed so markedly higher it is imperative that we look to see what kind of apnea events are getting flagged.
If your AHI that is so high is primarily central in nature...more pressure will NOT help and could potentially cause more centrals and that's why I don't advise just blindly increasing the pressures without more detective work.

Hopefully your machine will be either
Elite
AutoSet
or AutoSet for Her
and we can make use of the available software to see exactly what happened. I don't like guessing when hopefully there is data available so we don't have to guess.

Now sometimes we do have to guess....I don't like to but when we do have to guess we go about it carefully.

Oops....I see you changed the machine in your profile.
If you chose the for Her model AutoSet because you couldn't find the Autoset in the list.....look down in the R section of the equipment list.
The AirSense 10 Autoset that isn't the for her model got stuck down in the Rs....all by itself. Huge confusion I know but apparently too much trouble to fix that problem.

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Sun May 31, 2020 7:35 pm

Oops....I see you changed the machine in your profile.
If you chose the for Her model AutoSet because you couldn't find the Autoset in the list.....look down in the R section of the equipment list.
The AirSense 10 Autoset that isn't the for her model got stuck down in the Rs....all by itself. Huge confusion I know but apparently too much trouble to fix that problem.

Thanks for the detailed replies! I did change my machine in my profile. I do have the AirSense 10 Autoset. I'll definitely take your advice and leave the settings alone for now. This is all very new to me and I don't have a clue what I'm doing. The VA just mailed the machine so I've kind of been on my own since receiving it. I'll install the Oscar software and try and get that figured out. I think I'm just more curious of my sleep apnea has gotten that much worse in a matter of months but know I need to figure out why my number of events jumped so high. Hopefully I can figure the Oscar software out. I had no idea there was a way to look into the data at home. That's awesome!

Thanks again for the help! It's so nice to have a community of people willing to help.

Welcome to the forum. From what I have seen, there seem to be quite a few members here who have gotten then equipment from the VA. The amount of help you get in adjusting to your machine from the VA varies quite a bit depending which VA hospital you use. You can find a lot of help here. All you have to do is ask. It does not take long to learn who really offers sound advice and who you should ignore.