Centrals and Doctor Wont Do Anything

I could pretty much match your experience, including focus on centrals. I was not getting good sleep and the Doctor just kept saying "is it better than before?" well yes, but it still sucked. I adjusted the machine AirCurve BiLevel as much as I could and still could not stay asleep. I would wake up for no good reason, get up and walk around for a few minutes, and then go back to sleep. My Doctor strongly resisted an ASV, that I was sure was what I needed. Pressure was 8-15. mostly centrals and hypopneas.

Turns out I had COPD on top of sleep apnea. The machine treated the SA and not the COPD. Got an inhaler and now I sleep like I did in high school.

I still get the same number of centrals and periodic breathing, waveforms still look ugly. The Doctor was right, all this was not what was waking me up and this was nothing to worry about. I suggest you make sure you have tuned up all the comfort settings to get them the best for you that you can. If you still need more see if you think you are having problems exhaling into pressure, even with EPR set to 3. If so talk with your doctor about a BiLevel machine.

If this still does not work, see a pulmonologist like I did and find out if something else is going on in addition to your SA.

Linda, I'm not close to Pugsy's league as far as being able to interpret your sleepyhead data, but based on what your doctor has told you, as well as what I've experienced personally, I'm going to predict you've got nothing at all to worry about here. I want to share my SH data from during my first month of treatment:



See all those centrals? Just like yours. I never worried about them because I noticed that I had some centrals even during my sleep test that my doctor wasn't concerned about, and I also read here that the most common thing apnea sufferers get worked up over is seeing centrals and thinking they are something that should be worried about when they aren't. I think your centrals are reflecting not sleeping well, and are not "real" centrals. What I noticed without exception is when I was having a horrible time sleeping with my cpap, my centrals were much higher.

Now I've adapted and am sleeping better and here's what a typical night looks like now:



So there you have it, all those centrals I was seeing were not "real" centrals. So please, don't worry about the centrals, you are fine ! Focus your energy on dealing with your sleep issues and anything else you need to do to adapt to cpap, or adapt it to you.

You know I just had a thought...to make it less guess work as to whether you are asleep or awake during the night when these centrals are popping up could you maybe have the presence of mind to reach over and turn your machine off and then right back on? This will show up on the graphs and we would have a better idea as to awake or asleep status. If you see centrals immediately prior to the on/off thing or immediately after it then we would know for sure that you were awake and thus eliminate those from the evaluation process.