Severe aerophagia and IBS, newbie

General Discussion on any topic relating to CPAP and/or Sleep Apnea.
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total_nonsense
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Sep 03, 2018 12:58 pm
Location: Northern CA

Severe aerophagia and IBS, newbie

Post by total_nonsense » Mon Sep 03, 2018 2:16 pm

Hey wonderful people! I'm so glad I found this community!

Got my Airsense 10 about week ago and have been having a really hard time with it. I have mild IBS and struggle with stomach bloating. With the help of my GI doctor I've managed to get to a point where my bloating is mostly mild and not painful, however when I started CPAP therapy things got bad pretty fast. My stomach gets severely bloated during the night and I wake up in pain from the gas build up multiple times per night (think of the sharp piercing pain you get when you have diarrhea). My body is also unable to completely get rid of the excessive gas during the day so the bloat is just building up. I'm going to take a couple of night off CPAP until things go back to normal.


General CPAP Pressure question:


Initial prescribed pressure was 8-13 which strikes me as a bit high as my BMI is in the 19-20 range. No titration study was performed even though they made me just lay down with with a CPAP mask for 15 minutes while awake before my sleep study (no idea if this is relevant. My AHI ranged from 0 to 2.29 (depending on the night). Link to sleepyhead screenshot for the 2.29 night : Image

I lowered the pressure to 6-9 and got 0.3 AHI but there was no improvement with the aerophagia. Sleepyhead link: Image

Any suggestions on how to tweak the pressure will be greatly appreciated. I can't get an appointment with my doctor before February

Aerophagia questions

Any tips or tricks would be greatly appreciated.

I've tried doing general yoga poses throughout the day with no relief, running in the am and pm which helps a little, crossfit: this helps a lot, but I can only do it a couple times a week. Overall I'm very active and open to trying any activity that might provide relief.

Not eating at all does make things much more bearable but it's not a sustainable strategy.
Have any other IBS sufferers struggled with something similar? If so do you have any advice on how to tackle this?

I've always slept in a position very similar to the Falcon one mentioned here. Are there any other positions I should give a try?

Can it be a mask problem? I have the Philips Dreamwear and I can tolerate it. I started with the ResMed P10 mask but woke up either pulling on the hose or with a disassembled mask.

Does aerophagia never get better for some people? I'm honestly feeling so hopeless right now. I was mentally prepared that getting used to CPAP will take months but I was not expecting it to be so bad.

nicholasjh1
Posts: 517
Joined: Wed Jun 14, 2017 9:07 am

Re: Severe aerophagia and IBS, newbie

Post by nicholasjh1 » Tue Sep 04, 2018 3:35 pm

Well I do have IBS'ish symptoms (a lot of foods "activate" me and my movements are to frequent). The first time I tried taping I had this issue with severe bloating and pain. It scared me enough to stop taping, but I eventually went on and off taping to help modulate it, eventually the Aerophagia just stopped happening (I guess my stomache sphincters got stronger? , or at least it's low enough that I don't get pain (I do notice extra farting in the morning. ) Now I didn't see whether you use taping or not so I'm not sure if taping is an option to help, but I thought I'd share if that gives you any ideas.
I will say I raised the pressure and it helped with this issue, Though my AHI was .5 I think I may have been having short apnea's and during the apnea I'd get air down the wrong pipe essentially. By raising the pressure it decreased the short (less then 10 second and thus not counted by the machine) Apneas and then the aerophagia lowered even more...
Instead of Sleep apnea it should be called "Sleep deprivation, starving of oxygen, being poisoned by high CO2 levels, damaging the body and brain while it's supposed to be healing so that you constantly get worse and can never get healthy Apnea"