andjnk wrote: This coward has come completely off allergy meds. Sleep is too important.
Well, in my case, the seasonal allergies themselves seem to aggravate the OSA and drive my 90% pressure levels up if all I'm doing is the non antihistamine approaches. And the seasonal allergies start with tree pollen (spring), move onto grass and weed pollen (summer), and proceed to ragweed pollen (fall).A combination of nasal irrigation, avoidance of triggers, and PAP therapy now has the problem mostly under control. PAP therapy has lessened my nonallergic rhinitis to the point that the allergies are now manageable with irrigation and avoidance.
When a nervous system is hyped up with panic juice all night from apneas, everything in life is an irritant and a trigger. Successful PAP makes everything better than it was.
Breathing custom-humidified, filtered air all night doesn't hurt the cause, either.
And while breathing the filtered BiPAP air while sleeping helps some, for me it is not enough by itself: I suspect that without a daily antihistamine, my *daytime* congestion from the allergies is causing the upper airway to become very mildly inflamed each day. And by bedtime I think the inflamation may be just barely enough to make my already small airway a bit more narrow, and so more prone to collapsing (hence the higher AHI). And I also think the slightly inflamed airway may simply need a bit more pressure to prop it open (hence the slightly higher 90% pressure levels).
And for me, the BiPAP humidifier setting remains problematic: At a setting of 2, the humidified air doesn't tend to cause too much night time congestion and the nasal passages are not too dried out in the morning. But they don't feel "normal" either. And how I manage to get both nasal congestion and nasal drying at the same time is beyond me, but it happens. *sigh* At 3, the humidity definitely triggers additional night time congestion, but nasal passages feel normal (not dry) in the morning. At 1, there's no problem with night time congestion, but upon waking the nasal passages are so dry they feel parched and hurt.
So the compromise this spring has been to start taking Zyrtec once a day in the morning. Both the sleep doctor's PA and my PCP have confirmed that I should be ok with taking Zyrec or Allegra or Claritin on a daily basis all through the spring, summer, and fall until the first killing frost comes. [There's a reason winter is my favorite season that goes beyond skiing.] Claritin has never been particularly effective for me in the past, but generic Zyrtec seems to do the job. And I may look over a generic Allegra package when my current bottle of Zyrtec runs out in a week or ten days.
