Seven Nights on Autoset II - Going Well
Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 5:03 pm
Just thought I’d share where we are after my husband’s first week on Autoset II. Sorry this is such a long post!
We are very open to opinions you might have about the results, how we’ve interpreted them, and what we are planning to do. We just hope we can keep this from becoming another duel over CPAP vs. APAP. We made a choice to follow our doctor’s prescription for the machine to start with for one week, and then decide if we wanted to try some other settings, like narrowing the bracket for APAP, or trying straight CPAP mode.
Seven nights on APAP with settings from 4 – 20 (as prescribed by the doctor), and the bottom line is that we don’t seem to have enough experience yet to move from the current pressure settings. We have gotten some great results after working out some kinks, but haven’t had much experience without major kinks. Not that we don’t want to test some other settings, we just think it would be premature right now.
The most important measure for us is not necessarily the results reported by the machine, but how well my husband feels. We’ve been tracking the machine results numbers, but also two other subjective measures – how my husband feels the next morning compared to how he felt pre-APAP, and how well he thinks he slept. Several nights he thought he was awake a good part of the night because he: 1) was too excited about possibly getting a good night’s rest; 2) the mask was tugging when he moved in bed; 3) rainout; 4) dry mouth. We worked on all those things – getting a well-functioning hose hanger, cover for the hose, trying different humidifier settings, just getting into a routine with the equipment. The AHI readings from the machine during the seven days were all under 7.0, and if adjusted to cut out half the hypoapneas, less than 3.1. We realize those numbers are not the same as what a sleep study would measure, but fairly good for this machine.
The seventh night (last night), was the best night for my husband. He feels like he slept well AND he feels significantly more awake, rested and alert. This is the first time he gave me very positive ratings on both those subjective measures. However, last night the machine didn’t report the best results – he had a lower AHI on three other nights and lower leak rates on several other nights. The problem is, these numbers aren’t very comparable if he was awake for significant parts of some nights and if we were making major changes to the humidifier settings and hose management.
We are currently at a humidifier setting of 2.0. My husband still feels a bit of dry mouth in the morning, so he would like to go higher, but then he suffers from rainout, despite our hose hanger, hose cover and space heater. I think we may try the aussie-heated hose or the reptile cable. He despises the rainout – probably like most of you. Our home-made hose hanger solution is working great. He says he can move all around and doesn’t feel the mask move. We were going to get the Hozer, but this seems to be doing the trick.
Even though he had his best night last night, his leak rates were not the best for the week, but sort of in the middle. The 95th percentile liters / minute number ranged from 3.6 to 13.2, and was 7.2 last night.
If I throw out the extremes, pressure variations were narrow:
- Med pressure between 7.0 and 7.8
- 95th percentile between 10.4 and 10.8, and
- max between 11.8 and 12.6.
- min between 4.0 and 5.0
Should we try to narrow the bracket? To something like 7 to 12? Or try a straight CPAP setting of 10? Maybe, but I’d like to see how the numbers look if he continues to have nights as good as last night. Before we test out any other pressure settings.
The other thing we might do is turn on EPR.
To summarize, this is our plan:
1. Continue on the same pressure settings for another week and re-evaluate
2. Try the reptile cable to heat the hose (cheapest option first!)
3. Experiment with EPR
We are very open to opinions you might have about the results, how we’ve interpreted them, and what we are planning to do. We just hope we can keep this from becoming another duel over CPAP vs. APAP. We made a choice to follow our doctor’s prescription for the machine to start with for one week, and then decide if we wanted to try some other settings, like narrowing the bracket for APAP, or trying straight CPAP mode.
Seven nights on APAP with settings from 4 – 20 (as prescribed by the doctor), and the bottom line is that we don’t seem to have enough experience yet to move from the current pressure settings. We have gotten some great results after working out some kinks, but haven’t had much experience without major kinks. Not that we don’t want to test some other settings, we just think it would be premature right now.
The most important measure for us is not necessarily the results reported by the machine, but how well my husband feels. We’ve been tracking the machine results numbers, but also two other subjective measures – how my husband feels the next morning compared to how he felt pre-APAP, and how well he thinks he slept. Several nights he thought he was awake a good part of the night because he: 1) was too excited about possibly getting a good night’s rest; 2) the mask was tugging when he moved in bed; 3) rainout; 4) dry mouth. We worked on all those things – getting a well-functioning hose hanger, cover for the hose, trying different humidifier settings, just getting into a routine with the equipment. The AHI readings from the machine during the seven days were all under 7.0, and if adjusted to cut out half the hypoapneas, less than 3.1. We realize those numbers are not the same as what a sleep study would measure, but fairly good for this machine.
The seventh night (last night), was the best night for my husband. He feels like he slept well AND he feels significantly more awake, rested and alert. This is the first time he gave me very positive ratings on both those subjective measures. However, last night the machine didn’t report the best results – he had a lower AHI on three other nights and lower leak rates on several other nights. The problem is, these numbers aren’t very comparable if he was awake for significant parts of some nights and if we were making major changes to the humidifier settings and hose management.
We are currently at a humidifier setting of 2.0. My husband still feels a bit of dry mouth in the morning, so he would like to go higher, but then he suffers from rainout, despite our hose hanger, hose cover and space heater. I think we may try the aussie-heated hose or the reptile cable. He despises the rainout – probably like most of you. Our home-made hose hanger solution is working great. He says he can move all around and doesn’t feel the mask move. We were going to get the Hozer, but this seems to be doing the trick.
Even though he had his best night last night, his leak rates were not the best for the week, but sort of in the middle. The 95th percentile liters / minute number ranged from 3.6 to 13.2, and was 7.2 last night.
If I throw out the extremes, pressure variations were narrow:
- Med pressure between 7.0 and 7.8
- 95th percentile between 10.4 and 10.8, and
- max between 11.8 and 12.6.
- min between 4.0 and 5.0
Should we try to narrow the bracket? To something like 7 to 12? Or try a straight CPAP setting of 10? Maybe, but I’d like to see how the numbers look if he continues to have nights as good as last night. Before we test out any other pressure settings.
The other thing we might do is turn on EPR.
To summarize, this is our plan:
1. Continue on the same pressure settings for another week and re-evaluate
2. Try the reptile cable to heat the hose (cheapest option first!)
3. Experiment with EPR
