[Equipment] what are repercussions of capping max pressure?

[famewolf]

I ditched the cervical collar last night....used 7-15 epr 3 for first part of night and then 7-13 epr 3 cause I was woken up by air blowing across my eyes.

Laid on my side for 2nd part of night.

[Brazen]

Your flow limit is terrible. Should be aiming for flow limit 95% under 0.1, ideally 0.03.

Hopefully the experts can offer some suggestions.

[famewolf]

With the aid of a body pillow I laid on my right side all night..didn't go as well as I expected....seem to get better results when I was on my back?


In reference to the flow limits...they only show "bad" where the pressure is being hard capped at 13.4.  Currently I can't go past that with the mask I have without it hissing and waking me up laying on my back...I'll see if I can bump up the pressure while laying on my side.

Added the AHI chart for comparison.

[cathyf]

If you have lots of flow limitations on a resmed machine it will blow up to whatever pressure it can trying to get rid of them. My apnea has evolved over the years, but at the beginning it was a very simple where awake meant no flow limits and asleep meant crazy flow limits.

After 8-1/2 years of resmed machines, I'm mighty suspicious of the quality of the data during large leaks. It looks to me like the machine gets confused and starts doing funky things and getting weird results and gets even more confused and gets even funkier, until eventually whatever it's doing wakes me up and then it figures out what's going on.

If I had the minimum pressure too low, then I would get into this state where the instant I fell asleep the flow limits start and the machine zooms the pressure it would be a LOT higher than what it was when I was falling asleep. If I bumped the minimum up a bit -- 9 or 10 rather than 7 -- then instead of zooming from 7 to 11 it would be 10 to 11. Mask adjustment can be a real balancing act, and having the pressure while you are awake falling asleep be running at a level closer to what it's going to be after you are asleep allows you to make a few little tweaks that will be the difference between a small leak you sleep through and a large leak that wakes you up.

[famewolf]

With me the flow limits seem to go bad WHEN it reaches the top cap.   Woke up in middle of night with mask off again but think I finally figured out WHY this time....I slid down the pillows which I think made the back of the mask roll up the back of my head....I'd probably need a strip of velcro that connects to something around my neck to stop that from happening....not sure of solution..I ordered a different chin strap and anti snore mouthpiece to see if they would cause less of a conflict with the cpap mask.  Last night was 10-13.8.