At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Lifeisabeach · Post by **Lifeisabeach** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 4:43 pm

AHI wrote: ↑
Wed Mar 18, 2020 8:47 pm

Miss Emerita wrote: ↑
Wed Mar 18, 2020 8:30 pm
Congratulations on your weight loss! Here is information about CPAP and Medicare:

https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/conti ... re-devices

There’s no way to tell ahead of time whether reaching a particular weight would mean the end of apnea for you. There are plenty of us who are at our medically recommended weight but have apnea anyhow.

Still, your doctor might well be willing to order a new sleep test if you reach your goal. And for some people, the significant change in weight does solve the apnea problem.
Thanks. And thanks for the link. My previous doctor said if I lost weight, there is a good chance I would be free from OSA, or at least have lower pressure settings. We'll see.

Yes, and you definitely should give them a heads up now. Even though you aren't at your target weight, the American Academy of Sleep recommends re-testing after losing 10% or more of your body weight, and you are WELL past that now. At the minimum, your provider should want to look at your data, maybe make minor adjustments if needed and then re-assess before deciding to re-test. This is what I'm going through right now actually, but I'm "only" right around the 10% mark. If you are running at a higher pressure level than your current condition requires, you do risk triggering central apnea events and compromising your health and the progress you've made.

If they seem disinterested in even minimally checking your data, or you yourself are disinclined to have them do it, at least consider downloading OSCAR and letting the more knowledgeable folks here take a look at the data for you.

Some reading material regarding recommendations:
https://www.eossleep.com/2016/01/25/is- ... eep-apnea/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2699173/

chunkyfrog · Post by **chunkyfrog** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 5:13 pm

Losing excess weight is almost always a good thing--but it cannot fix everything.

babydinosnoreless · Post by **babydinosnoreless** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:34 pm

palerider wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 11:49 am

Lifeisabeach wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:49 am
You should let your doctor know NOW that you've lost as much weight as you have. They likely will want to re-test you since an adjustment to your settings may be in order.
Better advice is to monitor data from the CPAP.

Retests are a waste of money and time.

What do we look for in the data PR ? I've lost over 50 lbs probably more now as I am trying to only eat twice a day and leave the snacks and food for my family that is working. My ahi is holding steady at just under one most days.

palerider · Post by **palerider** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:52 pm

babydinosnoreless wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:34 pm

palerider wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 11:49 am

Lifeisabeach wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:49 am
You should let your doctor know NOW that you've lost as much weight as you have. They likely will want to re-test you since an adjustment to your settings may be in order.
Better advice is to monitor data from the CPAP.

Retests are a waste of money and time.

What do we look for in the data PR ? I've lost over 50 lbs probably more now as I am trying to only eat twice a day and leave the snacks and food for my family that is working. My ahi is holding steady at just under one most days.

If you're on an auto, look to the pressure curve, if it's flat and your AHI is low, you can try lowering the min a cm at a time and see what happens. If the pressure curve is still moving around, then you still need what you've got.

Some people end up needing *more* pressure as they slim down.

Congrats, btw.

babydinosnoreless · Post by **babydinosnoreless** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:55 pm

palerider wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:52 pm

babydinosnoreless wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:34 pm

palerider wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 11:49 am

Lifeisabeach wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:49 am
You should let your doctor know NOW that you've lost as much weight as you have. They likely will want to re-test you since an adjustment to your settings may be in order.
Better advice is to monitor data from the CPAP.

Retests are a waste of money and time.

What do we look for in the data PR ? I've lost over 50 lbs probably more now as I am trying to only eat twice a day and leave the snacks and food for my family that is working. My ahi is holding steady at just under one most days.
If you're on an auto, look to the pressure curve, if it's flat and your AHI is low, you can try lowering the min a cm at a time and see what happens. If the pressure curve is still moving around, then you still need what you've got.

Some people end up needing *more* pressure as they slim down.

Congrats, btw.

Thank you!

Pugsy · Post by **Pugsy** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 8:01 pm

babydinosnoreless wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:34 pm
What do we look for in the data PR ? I've lost over 50 lbs probably more now as I am trying to only eat twice a day and leave the snacks and food for my family that is working. My ahi is holding steady at just under one most days.

If it were me and I had lost a lot of weight and I was wondering if either my pressure needs changed or maybe I got lucky and the OSA was resolved I would just start systematically doing a reverse titration with my machine to see if I still had events at lower pressures and how low could I go without having apnea events (if I got lucky and didn't have very many).

I lost 25 pounds a couple of years ago...working on another 25 but that's been difficult since I regressed a bit when I lost Sarge.
My pressure needs did change to slightly lower. Where I used to see 15 to 18 during probable REM almost every night...now I might see 15 once maybe every 2 weeks. Not nearly as often.
I don't hold out much hope that I could ditch the cpap though even if I got down to a much skinnier weight. I only weighed 110 when I got diagnosed. Gaining weight didn't cause my OSA. I am pretty sure menopause caused my OSA. Everything started to sag...boobs, butt, belly and airway tissues.

I was able to lower my minimum pressure with the weight loss though and rarely see it go as high as I used to see it go.

So a reverse titration....experimenting with lower pressures over time to see at what point I might get to where I didn't have events.
If I got lucky enough to make it to fixed 4 cm...and still no real numbers of apnea events then I would have a sleep study without cpap to see if for sure I still wasn't having any apnea events.

At least that is how I would use the machine to monitor my experiments.

babydinosnoreless · Post by **babydinosnoreless** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 8:14 pm

Pugsy wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 8:01 pm

babydinosnoreless wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:34 pm
What do we look for in the data PR ? I've lost over 50 lbs probably more now as I am trying to only eat twice a day and leave the snacks and food for my family that is working. My ahi is holding steady at just under one most days.
If it were me and I had lost a lot of weight and I was wondering if either my pressure needs changed or maybe I got lucky and the OSA was resolved I would just start systematically doing a reverse titration with my machine to see if I still had events at lower pressures and how low could I go without having apnea events (if I got lucky and didn't have very many).

I lost 25 pounds a couple of years ago...working on another 25 but that's been difficult since I regressed a bit when I lost Sarge.
My pressure needs did change to slightly lower. Where I used to see 15 to 18 during probable REM almost every night...now I might see 15 once maybe every 2 weeks. Not nearly as often.
I don't hold out much hope that I could ditch the cpap though even if I got down to a much skinnier weight. I only weighed 110 when I got diagnosed. Gaining weight didn't cause my OSA. I am pretty sure menopause caused my OSA. Everything started to sag...boobs, butt, belly and airway tissues.

I was able to lower my minimum pressure with the weight loss though and rarely see it go as high as I used to see it go.

So a reverse titration....experimenting with lower pressures over time to see at what point I might get to where I didn't have events.
If I got lucky enough to make it to fixed 4 cm...and still no real numbers of apnea events then I would have a sleep study without cpap to see if for sure I still wasn't having any apnea events.

At least that is how I would use the machine to monitor my experiments.

Thank you.

Lifeisabeach · Post by **Lifeisabeach** » Thu Mar 19, 2020 9:18 pm

Pugsy wrote: ↑
Thu Mar 19, 2020 8:01 pm
I lost 25 pounds a couple of years ago...working on another 25 but that's been difficult since I regressed a bit when I lost Sarge.
My pressure needs did change to slightly lower. Where I used to see 15 to 18 during probable REM almost every night...now I might see 15 once maybe every 2 weeks. Not nearly as often.
I don't hold out much hope that I could ditch the cpap though even if I got down to a much skinnier weight. I only weighed 110 when I got diagnosed. Gaining weight didn't cause my OSA. I am pretty sure menopause caused my OSA. Everything started to sag...boobs, butt, belly and airway tissues.

I was able to lower my minimum pressure with the weight loss though and rarely see it go as high as I used to see it go.

My P.A. has been remotely checking in on my numbers periodically since my last checkup a couple months ago when they found an unexpectedly high number of nightly AHIs that had been going on for a few months. I had a couple factors in play with my machines as it turns out that I discovered 2-3 weeks after that and are taken care of now. That immediately got leaks and AHI down considerably, but the AHI wasn't quite down to where it had been before. However, right after I saw her was when I saw an endocrinologist and he put me on meds to stimulate weight loss since diet and exercise alone weren't working and the weight started shedding immediately. I'm down now about 38 pounds in about 8 weeks. At this point, since the machine issues are resolved, the lingering elevated AHIs are presumably due to weight loss. My P.A. did drop my settings from 18/8 to 17/7 a couple weeks ago and that has brought my numbers down almost back to where they were a year ago, but we're still not quite there. The meds may be a complicating factor, though since they are taken first thing in the morning, they should be largely metabolized by bedtime. I'm about to go off them anyway so I'll know more after that happens.

Amishboy51 · Post by **Amishboy51** » Sat Mar 21, 2020 7:19 am

First and foremost, congratulations on your weight loss! As someone who hasn't been within 40 (okay, 50) pounds of what's probably my goal weight (185?) in 20+ years, your progress is very impressive, so continued success.

That said, and not trying to be a downer, my advice is to just focus on the weight loss, and let your OSA take care of itself. If your doctor said your OSA would "disappear" with significant weight loss, he/she was either trying to be encouraging or, unfortunately, is ill-informed. Just speaking anecdotally, there are "normal-sized" folks with OSA, and, unfortunately, it's not likely that losing 200 pounds (even reaching your goal weight) will "cure" your OSA.

So, again, congrats on your success, but IMO, you're better off focusing more on your weight and general fitness, and less on the apnea, and just assume that you'll be using cpap (unless medicine comes up with something different) for a long time.

At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Re: At what BMI does OSA disappear?

Machine	Mask

Additional Comments: ResMed AirTouch F30i