Self titration help

I need the board's help with self-titration. As it turns out, my insurance didn't cover my first night sleep study nor will they cover the titration study: However; insurance did provide me with my machine. The machine is set from 4-20cm. Last night was my first night. Very poor sleep. I need assistance in finding my right range. As I understand it, 4 is set too low. Does anyone have suggestions for going about this in an orderly, accurate strategy?

Thank you in advance.

Can you give us any data that was showing on the machine after last night?

Edit: save this, you will need to reset to zero the 7/30 day average therapy data each night after documenting data results.

To reset LCD Therapy data (does NOT erase any data from SmartCard):

1. Hold down the (<-) (->) buttons while plugging in the power on the back,
wait for 2 beeps or 5 seconds, release buttons.
2. Press the (->) key and navigate to Therapy screen. (There is a minus sign in the lower right corner)
3. Press and HOLD down the (-) minus key for 5 seconds and/or until therapy data is reset to Zero.
4. Press the On/Off button to exit.

This resets all info (ahi, leak, usage, blower hours, etc) back to 0 except the blower hours visible in the clinician menu.

If you don't have the smart card, card reader and software it's well worth the investment. You probably got the card with the machine. I think the bundle for both the card reader and software is $199 on CPAP.com. Using the software makes it much easier to understand the effectiveness of your therapy.

Until then you'll need to read the LCD display as Pugsy suggests.

It might be worth the expense of paying for your own sleep study but only you can decide that.

I'm not a doctor and certainly can't tell you where to set your range. I was told that the average male needed a pressure setting of 10. I was prescribed a pressure of 11. I've moved mine up to 12.5 but I'm still in the process of fine tuning.

When I first started on CPAP I was using the ramp feature starting at 4 and felt that I wasn't getting enough air. I moved it up to 8 for a while until I quit using the feature altogether. If I hadn't been prescribed a pressure I probably would have set mine up with a range of about 4 - 6 cmH2O starting about 7 or 8.

If you have any data from last night it might give us some starting numbers so please check and post those numbers.
Leak rate
AHI
90% pressure

Also explain why the night was rough. While it is to be expected, there are things you can do to make it easier but we can't offer ideas to fix things if we don't know what needs fixing.

Long time member Rested Gal self diagnosed and self titrated and self treated. I bet she would have some good ideas on where to start and I just imagine she will chime in when she sees your question.

I'm not a doctor, either, but I will second DBoone's advice. 4 is way too low for a starting pressure. 8 is more reasonable. If you see good numbers at 8, try 7. But I bet you will have to raise pressure to 9 or 10 before you see a difference. Make changes slowly, and waut a few days between changes to see if any improvement or worsening is consistent.

If aat all possible, get yourself the reader and software. Lots of good advice here on making the best use of it.

I've got one night worth of data.
6:54 hrs
AHI 13.5
90% pressure 12.0cmH2O
Under the System Leak menu, the reading is 31.3

I have raised the min pressure for tonight to 8cm.

Working on getting the software.

You all are great.

sleepgeorgiabrown wrote:I have raised the min pressure for tonight to 8cm.

If I were going to guesstimate where to set the minimum pressure on an autopap and had nothing at all to go on, that's a good pressure to use as the minimum.

Seven, eight, nine, or ten... any of those would be reasonable numbers to just pull out of the air (no pun intended! ) for the minimum pressure setting for an autopap, imho.

Glad to see that Pugsy gave you the instructions on how to reset the data for the LCD display each morning. And glad to hear you'll be getting the software. That will help you a lot in your tweaking.