Question AHI 0.0

I was diagnosed 6 months ago with OSA. I was and am still overweight, with a BMI greater than 30. Since being diagnosed, I've lost 15 lbs. Initially I would register an AHI between 1-2. Now when I read my data in Sleepyhead most nights I am registering an AHI of 0.0 (4-5 nights a week). Some nights it does go up to about 0.40. I am starting to wonder if the weight loss "cured" my OSA. I follow up with my sleep doctor this coming January and plan to continue to wear the mask nightly and focus on continued weight loss. Just curious what other more experienced individuals opinions are. Thanks for reading.

Hi antimess,

Congrats with your weight loss. Others might pinch in with their own experience and research but it's probably unlikely that weight loss cured your OSA, you'll have to go to an other sleep study to confirm that. From what I've read in some case loss weight can lower your OSA but rarely cure it. But it's far from perfect science and some people's OSA even worsen when they loss weight but that seem pretty rare. And to make things more interesting OSA might be the cause of weight gain for some people, lack off good sleep can make you more hungry!

What you can do is put some Sleepyhead graph here so we can see what's happening. You might be able to lower your pressure a bit, that can be more confortable, especially if you are on high pressure.

What's your pressure setting right now?

Hi - you're obviously being well treated, and congrats on the wt loss!

However, you can't assume anything, OSA is rarely 'cured', but if you want to know if you still need Cpap, maybe weight a bit until you've lost even more wt and then have a new sleep study - it's the only valid way to know what's what. Having a low AHI is great, but all it means is that you're well treated, but doesn't address e.g. 02 desats (ever use a recording oximeter overnight?). And of course you could always go for at week without Cpap (I'm not saying you should...) and see how things go before having a new study done.

I'll post some graphs tonight when I get home. Right now my pressure is wide open, 5.0-17.0. I would need to look again to be sure, but my pressure typically stays below 11 most nights.

I haven't used an o2 oximeter over night. I'll look into that too. Thanks!

Well, if your at 5-17 and your pressure "stays below 11". It probably mean that your pressure go near 11. If that the case you certainly still have OSA and like Julie says probably means that you're well treated. Now if you were saying that your pressure is flat line at 5, that would be an other story... But even then, even 5 or 4 of a pressure can treat some OSA. We'll check your graph tonight, make sure to look on the forum how to do this and what kind of infos are the most helpful to show (sorry don't have the link...).

OSAHell wrote:Well, if your at 5-17 and your pressure "stays below 11". It probably mean that your pressure go near 11. If that the case you certainly still have OSA and like Julie says probably means that you're well treated. Now if you were saying that your pressure is flat line at 5, that would be an other story... But even then, even 5 or 4 of a pressure can treat some OSA. We'll check your graph tonight, make sure to look on the forum how to do this and what kind of infos are the most helpful to show (sorry don't have the link...).

Ditto to what OSAHell says. If the pressure is increasing then it is fighting something. If you didn't have OSA still going on it wouldn't have anything to fight and wouldn't be doing any changing.

Here's the link https://sleep.tnet.com/reference/tips/imgur
and a thread where there are examples of what we like to see
viewtopic/t103468/Need-help-with-screen-shots.html

antimess wrote: Right now my pressure is wide open, 5.0-17.0. I would need to look again to be sure, but my pressure typically stays below 11 most nights.

wide open is 4-20, for what it's worth.

and, as pointed out, your 'pressure stays below 11' is very telling.

your situation here is much like saying "I put on these glasses and now I can see everything sharply! are my eyesight problems cured?"

no, they're not cured, they're just being treated effectively.

Thanks for the information, that makes sense to me. For what it's worth here's one of my recent nights.

antimess, I'd be interested in seeing the Flow Limit and Snore graphs for that same night, posted right underneath the Pressure graph. ResMed machines respond pretty aggressively to snores and flow limitations. I don't have a snore line to speak of but I do get flow limitations and the lines in my FL graph and Pressure graph rise and fall together. If you stack those graphs and look at them you'll likely be able to see where/when your machine is doing its job.

I get a zero ahi 2 or 3 times a month. Enjoy it... you are successfully treating your disease! I will say that I normally don't feel as well, but that's me.

Sheriff

Keep in mind that the ahi you are seeing is your treated ahi. If your sleep apnea were cured, you would see an ahi of zero a pressure line that was straight across at the lowest setting. Your pressure does go up and down, so the machine is doing a great job of preventing events and keeping you well treated.

If you were to set your machine to a straight 5, you would see some events, and there would be even more if you were being monitored without using a cpap machine.

zoocrewphoto wrote:Keep in mind that the ahi you are seeing is your treated ahi. If your sleep apnea were cured, you would see an ahi of zero a pressure line that was straight across at the lowest setting. Your pressure does go up and down, so the machine is doing a great job of preventing events and keeping you well treated.

If you were to set your machine to a straight 5, you would see some events, and there would be even more if you were being monitored without using a cpap machine.

You know, it would be interesting to put a wide open auto machine on a "normal" person and see if it sticks at 4, or if it goes up and down a bit.

archangle wrote:You know, it would be interesting to put a wide open auto machine on a "normal" person and see if it sticks at 4, or if it goes up and down a bit.

I got it almost done on my sister. A while back I tested my machine (was the M series back then) and while we couldn't use 4 cm because she said I was trying to kill her by suffocation and we had to use 6 cm starting point...other than the test pressure probes the pressure never moved off 6 cm.
I don't think she has OSA. Her main complaint was fatigue. She wore the mask 3 nights. While it wouldn't be impossible for her to have OSA that is totally eradicated with 6 cm pressure I doubt that happened.
Her fatigue went totally away with a change in blood pressure meds.
Now her husband (who has the typical snoring/gasping symptoms) on the other hand...his pressure line went to 9 cm and stayed there. He refused to follow up though. "Not going to wear one of those damn things all night"

zoocrewphoto pretty much wrote what I was about to write this morning after a quick look at your graph last night. I don't see any point in changing anything now if most of your graph's nights look like this one.