New here but concerned about clear airway apnea

Hi everyone!!! I’ve been a BiPAP user for 9 months now. I was diagnosed with 94 ahi very severe sleep apnea back in Nov. They prescribed me a pressure of 17:12 and my ahi came down to an average around 5 or 6. I also used to get gassy in the morning and bloated so I spoke to my sleep specialist and told me to lower the pressure to 15:10. I’ve felt a lot better on this pressure and now my average has came down to about 3.5 ahi per night since. What concerns me is that I still have episodes of clear airway apnea’s according to my dreammapper. I’ll get as low as 4 and as high as 26 events on a night. I’ll probably average around 7-8 clentrals per night tho. I’ll have a few obstructive events as well tho but nothing too concerning. Despite all that being said I’m still under 5ahi which is considered “normal”. Am I supposed to be concerned that I still have central events or no because I’m under the normal range? My sleep specialist isn’t too concerned but he’s not a dr. and I just want to know whether I should get a 2nd opinion or not. Someone please help

• Download OSCAR
• Put an SD Card in your machine
• Post Graphs

The Pinned topics describes how to do that.

This will all people here to look at the therapy pressures and your responses and give you specific advice that address your needs.

Having a few clear airway apnea events get flagged is actually normal and not a big deal.
Some might even be awake related breathing getting flagged by mistake. Hold your breath for 10 seconds...that's essentially a 10 second clear airway apnea event. No air is moving but the airway is open. The machine doesn't know if we are asleep or not but if we pause our breathing while awake the machine will still flag that pause as a clear airway event. It doesn't count if we are awake. We must be asleep for it to matter.
So if you spend much time awake with mask and machine on there's a greater chance for some false positive flagging to happen.

It is normal to have a few real asleep central apneas during the night. There's a thing called sleep onset centrals that is normal and not a big deal unless we have a truckload of them and they keep bouncing us out of sleep. They happen when we transition from awake to asleep. So it's normal to see a few real asleep centrals. It's normal to wake up after a REM sleep cycle and we have several during the night and there's a potential for sleep onset centrals when we go back to sleep after waking up at the end of a REM cycle.

Get OSCAR and you can evaluate the flow rate to see if you were really asleep or not.
The videos here explain how to do that evaluation
http://freecpapadvice.com/sleepyhead-free-software

Reporting the number of clear airway events during the night doesn't do us any good without the number of hours the machine was used.
24 clear airway events during an 8 hour period means 3 per hour average...not a big deal.
24 clear airway events during a 2 hour period means 8 per hour average and might be a big deal.

OSCAR https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/
http://www.apneaboard.com/wiki/index.ph ... stallation
http://www.apneaboard.com/wiki/index.ph ... rpretation

Do you have a copy of your sleep report? It'd be good to know what proportion of your events were centrals then.

Thanks for the reply guys!!! I’ll try to work on Oscar tonight. Miss emerita my sleep study diagnosed me with a 94 ahi. I had 120 obstructive apnea’s 14 mixed and 2 were central during my sleep study. I believe this was done in 2 hours before the sleep tech put the mask on me.