Need Help Lowering my AHI

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 18, 2019 10:37 pm

Welcome to the forum.

The bulk of your AHI is ClearAirway/Central apnea and not much you can do about those except give it time and hope your wake ups during the night get reduced.

I don't know if the Flow Limitation graph is going to tell us much or not but need to see it just in case...
If it's very ugly then a little more pressure is usually what is suggested...and it may or may not help with the wake ups. It all depends if the FLs are causing a problem or not.

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 18, 2019 11:08 pm

Sometimes the machine will mistake awake breathing irregularities as some sort of apnea event because it only measures air flow and can't know if you are asleep or not.
It can happen that we get false positive flags with any of the apnea event categories but especially the central category because we pause our breathing often while awake and don't realize it.

A while back I had a night where my AHI was 3.4 and it was a nice mixture of all 3 categories. I took the time to zoom in on the flow rate to see if I was having real asleep events or if they were maybe related to being awake or having an arousal.
Every single flagged event was either arousal or post arousal related or I was blatantly awake. Not a single real asleep event at all with that AHI.
I did have a crappy night's sleep though...from back pain which caused me to wake many times during the night and I did a lot of tossing and turning.....so it didn't really surprise me to see the false positives. But I was surprised that every single event flagged wasn't real.

Go here and watch the videos especially the last one as it will explain how to zoom in and check the flow rate for asleep vs awake flow rate.
http://freecpapadvice.com/sleepyhead-free-software

It's very common for newbies to have more centrals at first....just don't sleep so great because everything is so new.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see that a good chunk of your centrals aren't real....but even if they were all real you aren't having enough of them for the doctors to start worrying about them. Even if real they sometimes will reduce on their own with time.
You need probably at least 5 centrals per hour...every hour...all night long before doctors will pay much attention.

Now you could maybe reduce or turn EPR off and see if that makes a difference....some people (very small minority) will have exhale relief trigger a few centrals. You may or may not be one of those people.

Your FL graph....very active.....are you having much nasal congestion? If so, that might explain the FL graph activity....if you are having much congestion consider adding some humidity....might help with the congestion and the congestion could possibly be a factor in the wake ups.