OSCAR Results Help

Hello,

Hoping to get some pressure / EPR recommendations based on these Oscar results. I changed the pressure and EPR settings from night 1 to night 2.

Should I lower my minimum pressure back to 7? I have read the CA's may be a result of new CPAP treatment, I have bee using my CPAP machine for about a month with a 7-20 pressure setting prior to downloading the Oscar program.

Thanks!

Thanks, I will look through and see if I am missing anything in my post that will be helpful.

I am no expert with definitive answers but welcome to CPAP, well APAP therapy. I've been at APAP therapy for 17 years. Your top OSCAR report looks very similar to some of my current ones. I have been told pressure increases are associated with the CAs and your higher pressure report looks like a classic example. I raised my min. pressure and OAs increased (not as much as yours) then decreased with time. I see you have no OAs with the pressure up. That is amazing to me. In 17 years I've never had zero CA that I am aware of.

The advice given to me was to give some time to let the CAs settle down and they did. I am at min. 9.5 max 19. I have been told I should be at min. 12+ but when I go there the CAs shoot up yet would probably come back down, but the mask leaks too much to be effective at 12+ maybe because I have a beard so I remain at 9.5.

I have found that adjusting the headgear nightly is important. I am so tired at times I just slap it on then crash. (70s term) It took me many years to realize how important daily adjustments are. You would think one adjustment should do it until the next new cushion is installed but for me, if I fiddle with straps before sleep, run the mask seal test, and adjust the mask as needed for a proper seal I get lower AHI scores.

You may want to take a look at SleepHQ and upload your OSCAR data for free there. It has a feature that allows a temporary link to the report where it can be examined better.

I am about to check my OSCAR report to see why I had AHI 10 the night before last and AHI 1.20 last night. I had lowered the max pressure quite a bit so maybe that's why.

Best of luck.

Thanks for the reply, I will look into this. I also added another night of data and reformatted the screenshots to make them easier to read.

Your pressures are being driven up by your flow limitations. The FLs may or may not be affecting the quality of your sleep; ditto the pressure changes. And yes, the CAs may go away on their own once your body gets used to CPAP. I'd also be willing to bet that many of the CAs come after arousals; if that's true, it's the arousals, not the CAs themselves, that might mess with your sleep. (You can zoom in on your flow rate to spot arousal breathing; it is deeper and messier-looking than nice, regular asleep breathing.)

You don't mention how rested you feel during the day. Could you let us know? While this is "subjective," it's a very important part of figuring out how to make CPAP work as well as possible for you.

Also, it'd be helpful to know whether you have a lot of nasal congestion. If you do, that could be contributing to your FLs, and there's not much the machine can do about that. You'd need to address the congestion separately.

I would suggest you use EPR of 3, because EPR is our easiest tool for trying to keep FLs down. And I would suggest using a constant pressure, just to see whether that helps you experience fewer arousals. Try min = max = 8 to start with.

Finally, you're still pretty new to CPAP. Patience is definitely a plus; getting the most out of CPAP can take some time as your body adjusts to the new experience.