Bad smells from CPAP & me

I have been using a "nose pillow" type CPAP for a couple years. About a year ago the mask began to smell bad - I am not the best at cleaning it as often as I should. Over time, I began to have a lot of night sweats and with them a very bad body odor. Mostly the sweating and smell come from around my head and chest and smell very strongly of meat (seriously). I tried very hard to clean the mask and humidifier tank - but no changes. Eventually I ordered a new mask, tube and filters and everything went away. I have had the new materials for only a couple months and it is all starting up again. Any experiences like this or any advice on how to fix?

Sounds like your CPAP therapy needs review and possible changes. If it were me, I'd see my doc and discuss what's going on. Many with untreated apena have terrible sweats at which provides food for the bacteria we normally have on our skin so they dramatically increase...they are stinky.

The odor may even be an indicator of a change in blood chemistry.
Please see your doctor.

How exactly do you clean your equipment? What type of soap do you use? What do you clean it in... kitchen sink, tupperware container, bathtub? How often are you cleaning? How are you drying the equipment? Try to give as much detail as possible, so we can do our best to help you.

Also, have you talked to your doctor about your night sweats and body odor? That might be helpful. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the night sweats come first, and then the smelly mask? Or vice versa?

Keeping a sleep diary might help you see if there is a connection between the night sweats and other things going on.

Keep us posted!

sleepygtr wrote:I have been using a "nose pillow" type CPAP for a couple years. About a year ago the mask began to smell bad - I am not the best at cleaning it as often as I should. Over time, I began to have a lot of night sweats and with them a very bad body odor. Mostly the sweating and smell come from around my head and chest and smell very strongly of meat (seriously). I tried very hard to clean the mask and humidifier tank - but no changes. Eventually I ordered a new mask, tube and filters and everything went away. I have had the new materials for only a couple months and it is all starting up again. Any experiences like this or any advice on how to fix?

What's odd is that when you talk to your Doctor about it, they say - 'Uh huh - yeah - right...' and they roll their eyes when your gone.

However, I know exactly what your talking about because that used to happen to me too. I thought it smelled like burning leather, and it came directly from my back at the base of my neck. On many nights it would be so alarming that it would wake me up because I thought I was smelling something burning. When I took off my sweated-through t-shirt at the end of the night, I could locate exactly on the shirt where the odor was coming from to within a 1-inch radius. It was always on the left side just below the base of my neck. My wife couldn't smell it, and she has an incredible sense of smell. My doctor couldn't smell it. Even when I brought in a shirt in a tupperware container and could myself still smell distinctly where the odor was on the shirt.

I think it's a combination of things, all of which come together as an 'alert' smell our bodies use to tell us something needs attention. We don't really think about olfactory indicators as humans, but dogs are used today to predict seizures and cancer via smell, so it pays for us to consider that maybe we're capable of doing the same for some odors.

I know that it was worse for me when I had a lot of sugar the day/night before a sweaty sleep. I noticed that the odor would persist on some shirts - usually dark blue cotton t-shirts - but not others. I wonder if what you're experiencing is similar to what I was experiencing. My symptoms, including night sweating and odors, stopped within months of starting CPAP therapy. I also cut back on sugary foods, so that might have been part of it too.

If this sounds familiar, you may not be getting ideal sleep therapy. As always, it's worth talking to your sleep doctor about this besides learning more here about things you can do to make your therapy more therapeutic. At first thought, I'm guessing you're mouth breathing - hence not actually getting therapy. A second consideration could be that your hose has a huge leak, also perhaps causing a lack of useful therapy. If you have a data-capable machine, check your large-leak graph in your data for a few nights. Large leak problems need to be addressed before anything else.

Beef? Pork? Rabbit? Gator? Cat?

roster wrote:Beef? Pork? Rabbit? Gator? Cat?

Well done rooster?

Water or condensation left in the hose or mask will smell bad as stagnent water. Are you drying the hose and mask? Smell like dirty socks?