Causes of Expiatory Mouth Breath?

[Norman2195]

Hi All,

I've narrowed down what has been trashing my CPAP therapy for the past months at it has been expiatory mouth breathing.

I mouth tape and use a chin strap, but unfortunately they do not stop the tendency to exhale out of my mouth throughout regular intervals of the night. 

I was wondering what the cause of this may be? I've attached an OSCAR screenshot of a typical night, any help understand this phenomenon and its causes would be much appreciated. 

Kind regards,
N.

[Gideon]

I don't see the issue you are talking about.

I see fairly normal, but flow limited breathing with fairly equal inhale and exhales, I see an arousal and some breath holding classified as a central, and another minor disturbance

Expiratory mouth breathing typically shows with a nasal mask, you should only be breathing thru your nose, as a decrease in expiration volume. With a full face mask you don't care as that's the point of using a full face mask

What am I missing?

[Norman2195]

Hi Gideon,

Thanks for your reply. So those CA events are actually false flagged. If you take a closer look at the more zoomed in screenshot that I showed you, you can see that the CA is followed by the exhale through the mouth which causes an arousal, the CA is then caused by a position change. I've woken up to this many times a night where I develop chipmunk cheeks through my mouth tape, and the rotate in bed and fall asleep again, only to be awoken by chipmunk cheeks again 30 minutes later. 

Cheers,
N.

[Gideon]

The CA is caused by you holding your breath while you are shifting position.

Chipmunk cheeks is caused by you not holding your tongue at the back top of you pallet.

[Norman2195]

Could there be other possible reasons why my body decides to divert air through to my mouth during sleep?. Would settings like EPR perhaps help?

[Gideon]

Anything that lowers average pressure would help.

I was, many years ago a mouth breather, I learned the tongue technique. It took me months to master. No problems since

[Norman2195]

Thank you so much for this. Do you have any resources you can point be towards regarding this tongue hold so I can learn more about it? I think my oral posture is horrible during sleep as I used to be a mouth breather.  Do you also think that i may be struggling to exhale against the pressure and hence the need to exhale through the mouth?

Kind regards,
N.

[Sleepster]

The solution to your problem is a full face mask.

[Gideon]

Look at the mouth breathing section of the Mask Primer, link in my signature.