Self Diagnosed/Self Treated Purchased CPAP Story/Questions

I suspected I had sleep apnea based on snoring, teeth grinding, waking up, feeling tired and waking up during the night to urinate (2x).

I did not want to be "officially" diagnosed with sleep apnea, in the US it would affect my future insurance rates, life insurance premiums, future insurance coverage (preexisting condition). It is not sleep apnea if its never been diagnosed... (jk jk)

I first started by purchasing my own mouthpiece device from amazon to move my jaw forward while I slept. Seeing great results with this (no more snoring) I thought I could call it a day. However, recently I started to feel tired even after sleeping and had my eyes burning. I no longer remembered dreaming when I woke up. I finally decided that it was time to get a CPAP machine. I was able to get a prescription online for a CPAP Dreamstation auto cpap with humidifier and the Dreamweaver mask (mouth breather). I used it for the first time last night and after reading some of the stickies it looks like I am on the right path to helping get this under control. I am alone (no medical support) on this issue and just want some input on my data.

Based on my data import to OSCAR it looks like my AHI is 6.2 was using the cpap a good move?

I did wake up 2x in the night and took my mask off to use the restroom so some data points may not be accurate. Should I adjust any settings on the machine or keep getting data points? It looks like I had some obstructions but the pressure did not increase to 15 to try and clear it?

Any other tips on what I can do to make this better? I did feel slightly more refreshed today I may start to log when I wake up to urinate to see if I can tie the event to an obstructive airway.

How about a detailed report not zoomed in? Were you awake during the zoomed in section you posted? Your flow rate breathing looks more like arousal/awake breathing than asleep breathing to my eye.

I circled the asleep breathing here in red...anything not circled is arousal related and doesn't count.
Your machine doesn't measure sleep status...it only measures air flow and arousal/awake breathing is very irregular when compared to asleep breathing and false positives are common.





And the minimum pressure is going to be your most critical pressure setting...the machine won't do anything at all when the apnea event is actually happening. It sits back and twiddles its little thumbs during the apnea event and once the airway opens up normally the machine then decides if it needs to increase the pressure to better prevent that apnea event from happening again.
It simply can't actually respond fast enough with enough pressure to force collapsed airway tissue to open up.
It works best my preventing the apneas from happening in the first place....so the minimum pressure is your key most important setting.

Pugsy thanks for the quick reply.

I do not recall being awake at that time maybe I should keep a log going forward if it helps with the data. I did take my mask off 2x last night. Here is my zoomed out data charts

Were you on your back most of the time or at least especially at the beginning of the night?
It's common for OSA to be worse when we are on our backs.

I suggest trying at least a minimum of 6 cm starting pressure...up from the 5 cm.
The bulk of your AHI that we can treat with more pressure is hyponea..and it's usually fairly easy to kill those with a little more pressure.
We can't do anything about the CA/central apnea with more pressure except cross our fingers that if the hyponeas are maybe causing arousals (you may or may not remember) that the centrals reduce if the chance of arousals reduce.

You might want to go here and learn about arousal breathing false positives...while it mainly talks about central/CA bear in mind that we can have false positives in any event category.
http://freecpapadvice.com/sleepyhead-free-software

Assuming you were asleep when the OAs and hyponeas were flagged...you probably do have some level of OSA or airway restrictions going on.
If you didn't see the pressure graph moving at all...and you were asleep...you might not have OSA but remember even a minimum pressure does have therapeutic value and it wouldn't be impossible for OSA to be adequately dealt with from as little as 4 cm pressure.
I have seen it happen.

I sleep on my side most of the time unless I'm not aware of switching to my back.

I will switch to a 6CM starting pressure and move the ramp to 5.

I will post back in a week with an update hopefully more data points can be informative on if I have OSA and if I should continue using the CPAP.

I did have an idea of having the CPAP set at a pressure of 1 one night just to have a sort of sudo "sleep study", what are your thoughts on that?

dram986 wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:02 am

I did have an idea of having the CPAP set at a pressure of 1 one night just to have a sort of sudo "sleep study", what are your thoughts on that?

Good idea...on paper but not so good in real life.

1...the machine won't allow a setting below 4 cm
2...even if it could be set lower there's a risk with re breathing carbon dioxide laden air that doesn't get ventilated well if the pressure was only 1 cm....there's a reason these machines won't go lower than 4 cm besides just overall comfort.

Now what you could do is set it to 4 cm minimum and maximum and not let the machine try to fight anything with more pressure and see just how much stuff gets flagged at 4 cm.
That's the best you can do using the machine as a DIY screening tool.

Welcome, dram986. You've done an excellent job of taking care of your health -- getting a prescription and a machine and using Oscar right off the bat. It's also great that you were able to use the machine all night your first night.

The best way to understand whether you have been sleeping badly due to apnea is to continue PAP therapy and see whether you feel better during the day. So if you keep a log of the number of times you get up to urinate, also log how you're feeling during the day. Of course, include changes to your settings in your log.

You can try the min = max = 4 experiment, but it will probably be uncomfortable and still won't be definitive, for the reason Pugsy gives. (The severity of apnea doesn't correlate with the amount of pressure needed to resolve it.)

If you want to keep track of when you were awake during the night, you can try deliberately inhaling and exhaling forcefully. On my flow-rate graph, the forceful exhale shows up pretty clearly, even on a fully zoomed out view. Some people will also deliberately spike a leak to use as a marker.

dram986 wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 28, 2021 9:53 am

I suspected I had sleep apnea based on snoring, teeth grinding, waking up, feeling tired and waking up during the night to urinate (2x).

welcome to the zoo! and congratulations on taking your therapy into your own hands. most of the forum regulars regard sleep doctors as pretty much useless. by starting on your own, you have accepted the responsibility for your own therapy.

i have nothing to add re: your charts. you are in the hands of two of the best people here already.

i'll just keep an eye open and pipe up when i have something to say.

oh wait, i just did that!