New to CPAP – Requesting Some Guidance

Hi all! I'm hoping to get some guidance from you to improve my treatment with CPAP.

I am a 30 year old male with a normal BMI that has been extremely tired for over a decade. I had a sleep study back in 2016, and though the doctor didn’t mention it, the report shows a potential UARS diagnosis (RDI > 5).

As I kept getting more tired with each passing year, I decided to try another sleep study using a WatchPAT ONE in 2023. My diagnosis came back as mild OSA based on a pRDI of 9.4 and O2 nadir of 91%. My overall AHI was 3.4. Both of these are a little bit higher than my sleep study in 2016.

I was prescribed CPAP therapy and received a ResMed AirSense 11 Autoset a little while back. It arrived with a minimum pressure of 4 cmH20, maximum of 20 cmH20, and EPR of 1. It is hard for me to see much of a difference yet, though I see some encouraging signs starting to emerge (like not feeling terrible following a nap after work).

I recently put an SD card in my CPAP machine and was hoping to get some recommendations based on my OSCAR data. I’ve been reading a lot of threads on this forum, and am not really sure which category I fall into (mild OSA, UARS, something else) and what adjustments I should make to improve my fatigue.

I attached my chart output over from OSCAR below from a recent night in addition to a zoomed in view that seemed to be a calmer time and one where a clear airway was detected (I also uploaded the screenshots at https://imgur.com/a/M40r2Gy. This seems to be one of the “smoother” looking nights. It has been normal over the past year for me to get up a couple of times per night (and it started prior to CPAP therapy), though I didn’t always wake up quite as much during the night.

Are there any setting adjustments you might recommend going forward? The only adjustment I have made thus far is adjusting the EPR to 3 a couple of nights ago. I can’t tell whether that made much of a difference yet.

Thank you!

Hi, not bad for a newbie, but I'd raise your min. pressure to e.g. 6 or 7 as 4, the default low, is hard to breathe at.

Is there a reason for the EPR? It actually makes your min. setting even lower and unless you were told to use it for a good reason, I wouldn't bother, or at least use e.g. 1 or 2, rather than 3.

And having "a" clear airway means zip, and having even a handful at bedtime or before waking up isn't a big deal, only if there are lots throughout the chart would it be worth looking into.

What was your AHI when you had your sleep study.

Thank you for your replies! I've adjusted the minimum pressure to 6 and set the EPR to 1. I'll report back on how these differences go.

In the sleep study, my AHI was 3.4 and my RDI was 9.4.