APAP pressure

Hi, Everyone,
I started 2 weeks ago with Resmed AirSense 11.
I set it to APAP mode with pressure range 4-10 (sleep study recommended range).
I noticed that when I wakeup in the morning (or at night) pressure is always 10 (or very close, like 9.9).
It was suspicious to me that machine always operates at upper range, so, I decided to use during the day, while working.
After 30 mins of use, when I was sitting in front of my computer, pressure jumped from 4 to 7, after that to 7.7, dropped to 6.5
and was fluctuating in that range. Why is this happening? I was not sleeping at the moment and definitely did not have any AHI being awake during the day.
Is this machine malfunction?

Thank You!

Welcome! I doubt whether your machine is malfunctioning. Awake breathing can be pretty irregular, and pressures can change in response to our holding our breath (which we often do without noticing it) or having a little nasal congestion.

It would help to know more about your settings. Is the ramp turned on? If yes, for how long, at at what pressure? Are you using EPR? If yes, at what level?

And just so you know: many people find 4 to be uncomfortably low, leaving them feeling a bit air-starved. Also, if you have EPR, you don't get its benefits at super-low pressures.

Your pressure is almost certainly going up while you're asleep in response to obstructive apneas, hypopneas, flow limitations, and snores. The fact that your pressure hovers at the high end of your range suggests that the range may be too low.

It would be great if you could use the Oscar software; we'd all be able to see a lot more about what's going on with your therapy. (See my signature block below.) You'd need an SD card in your machine and a desktop or laptop computer. Then you could post a chart to a service like Imgur and post a link here.

An alternative would be Sleep HQ, which you can explore here: https://home.sleephq.com/

paulbkus wrote: ↑

Wed May 31, 2023 3:32 pm

Hi, Everyone,
I started 2 weeks ago with Resmed AirSense 11.
I set it to APAP mode with pressure range 4-10 (sleep study recommended range).
I noticed that when I wakeup in the morning (or at night) pressure is always 10 (or very close, like 9.9).

That means your max pressure setting is too low for you (ie, your sleep study was wrong). a minimum of 4 is good enough for almost nobody.

paulbkus wrote: ↑

Wed May 31, 2023 3:32 pm

It was suspicious to me that machine always operates at upper range, so, I decided to use during the day, while working.
After 30 mins of use, when I was sitting in front of my computer, pressure jumped from 4 to 7, after that to 7.7, dropped to 6.5
and was fluctuating in that range. Why is this happening? I was not sleeping at the moment and definitely did not have any AHI being awake during the day.
Is this machine malfunction?

If you pull the data off the machine and put it into Oscar from that session, (you would have had to have a SD card in the machine to do this) you'll find that your awake breathing is very irregular, and you had some kind of breathing issues.

paulbkus wrote: ↑

Wed May 31, 2023 3:32 pm

I was not sleeping at the moment and definitely did not have any AHI being awake during the day.

You can't 'have an AHI" because AHI is an average of the number of events over time, it's not a 'thing'.

paulbkus wrote: ↑

Wed May 31, 2023 3:32 pm

I decided to use during the day, while working.
After 30 mins of use, when I was sitting in front of my computer, pressure jumped from 4 to 7, after that to 7.7, dropped to 6.5
and was fluctuating in that range. Why is this happening? I was not sleeping at the moment and definitely did not have any AHI being awake during the day.
Is this machine malfunction?

The machines are designed to report on and respond to "sleep-breathing". While awake, the machines' reporting and responding are worthless.