AHI and new mask

I received my Mirage Liberty last night. I didn't even bother waiting and went and got the Lanisoh cream....might actually use it when I jog instead of bandaids as my nipples have bled before. Anyway...I tried the mask on without the cream and noticed I could get a seal for a short period of time but then the pillows would shift a little when I rolled to my side during the test. I put some on and thought I had a good seal. I also took some Afrin for my stuff nose. I had a hard time going to sleep with the new mask. I woke up several times with a slight leak (so I thought) and a quick shift of the pillow (only 1 side) fixed the leak. At 4 am I woke up and decided to take the mask off for the rest of the night. When I finally woke up for the morning I took out my SD card and checked the data and it said my AHI for the night was 7.4. Large leake was 9%. I will get the exact individual data later tonight when I am at home. Is it normal the for the AHI to change so much with a new mask? I don't know if the Large Leak % is too high or not but I know that I have had nights where it is higher and my AHI has recorded as lower. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I think I hould clarify the Large Leak data. That's 9% of the night. I just found a chart on what the actual acceptable "Leak Rate" is so need to go back to the chart and see what the actual number is.

I just checked the info for the mask. The acceptable limit is 41. My average for the night last night was 47. So it appears that I wasn't too far off.

danimal71 wrote:I just checked the info for the mask. The acceptable limit is 41. My average for the night last night was 47. So it appears that I wasn't too far off.

Hi,

The average is only one number. Large leak is also important since you effectively might have been untreated at that time. It might be that the large leak came at a deeper sleep level where you need a bit more pressure. It could be that those large leaks were at the times where you have most of your events, meaning that you were mostly untreated overnight. So, you want to work on this until you can consistently keep that from happening.

I tried several nasal pillow masks, and I have only had luck with the Swift LT. Even that can be hard to work with--I find that I have a wonky night every other week or so. My nares are somewhat slotted, so I probably am not the best candidate for using pillows. I had a similar experience with the hybrids that I tried...any shifting would cause it to lose the seal. The only things that have worked for me is running them pretty tight, and using an odd shaped pillow that keeps the pressure off of the side of my face.

Finally, all changes take a bit of adapting. I would run 3 nights and look at the average before making any decisions.

-john-

jweeks thanks for the info. I went back and checked the chart. Based on the chart there was only 1 recorded "Large Leak" which lasted 15 minutes long. During that period there was 1 CA showing on the chart. After the Large Leak was over then there were some OA's noted. Hopefully tonight goes better with the mask.

Danimal, it takes a HUGE leak for it to show in the PR S1 LED screen as a "large leak", so something was not right with your mask. If you were just wearing nasal pillows I'd say you were mouth breathing, but the liberty oral interface is supposed to take care of that.

As for acceptable leak limit, it's not minutes of leak, it's liters per minute. You need to look at the leak chart of your Encore Viewer data and see what the leak rate was there--not the "large leak" data on the screen. Even though 47 (if you were looking at liters per minute) is not that far from 46, remember it's an AVERAGE and you had 15 minutes of a large leak. So there might be more leakage problem than you perceive.

Any "large leak" on the screen is too much--the data during a large leak is unreliable. You say you had only 1 central during that 15 minutes, but you can't count on the accuracy of that measurement. If you were in a large leak, there's no real way for the machine to measure your events accurately, since a large amount of air pressure is escaping.