General opinions on results

First time poster. The office that did the sleep study and prescribed the CPAP has been less than stellar about any sort of feedback and just say that everything looks good. I've been on CPAP for about 9 months, I'm a side sleeper, not overweight, don't drink and am fairly fit overall. While I feel slightly more rested since starting therapy, it has not been life changing. I'm looking for general input on my results.

Here's a link to a typical night. https://sleephq.com/public/c1a777b4-8c0 ... 218a69f304

On paper the results are "okay" but if you look at the flow rate zoomed in it looks like a lot of awake or semi awake breathing going on which points to less than optimal sleep quality.

How are you sleeping in general? Waking often for some reason or other or sleeping soundly for the most part?

The bulk of the flagged events follow an arousal of some sort and there's a lot of arousals or breathing that don't have any flags but the presence of the arousals means your sleep is not totally "sound". It's normal to have a few short lived arousals but you have more than a few and most of them are NOT short lived. It could account for feeling less than optimal the next day.

Do you take any medications of any kind? If so, what?
Any other physical or mental health issues that could maybe mess with sleep quality.

I don't feel like I sleep that good overall. I toss an turn a lot and have even before starting therapy. Over the years I've tried different mattresses and there were no noticeable changes.

I don't take any medications or other health issues that would effect sleep.

Life/work stress has been a little higher the past month or so but nothing that crazy. My sleep pattern has been fairly consistent since starting therapy so I don't feel like the stress has changed anything.

AHI was 38.5 during the sleep study so things have definitely improved.

Asleep breathing is nice and regular and even and smooth. Arousal (you may or may not remember it) or semi awake breathing is very irregular and usually fairly easy to spot. Yours was fairly easy (at least to my eye) and if you zoom in on the breathing you can see it with a bit of practice.

Here's an example of mine from a while back.

I circled the for sure asleep breathing in red .....all that other stuff is arousal or maybe awake breathing but I didn't remember an awakening at that time.


same time frame but just zoomed out more so the flow rate is sort of more scrunched together.


I toss and turn a lot and it shows in my flow rate but I have some arthritis pain issues since I am old and eat up with arthritis and it's just something I accept and deal with the best I can.

I think your settings are fine where they are at and I really didn't see any evidence of compromised breathing prior to the arousal breathing so I think you probably are getting good cpap treatment for your apnea issues but these machines can't tell if you are awake or asleep so it really can't help bad sleep unless you are having a rather large number of arousals caused by asleep apneas.....and I just didn't see it on the report you shared. What I saw was just bad sleep in general and the machine can't fix bad sleep unless it is caused by real asleep apneas.

When you see large/bigger gulps of air instead of nice low rhythmic breaths before a flagged event....that makes the flagged event a post arousal event and other than pointing to not being sound asleep we just have to ignore it. If you aren't sound asleep....they don't really count other than hinting to a sleep quality problem not related to the apneas.

For some of us, it's the pressure changes that disrupt sleep.

Your results do show some pretty steep changes, a few residual snores appearing when the pressure drops, and ditto for flow limitations.

I this were my data, I'd raise the minimum pressure to 7 or 7.2. Your machine is basically doing to many self corrections: up, down, oops that's too low, up again, down again, oops again.... and so on