Mouth leak & Apnea

[Bompa]

Once I started using a chin restraint all my readings improved. I also am a mouth breather and the chin restraint stopped that.
Good Luck!

[Sleepster]

Does anyone know if its possible for a CPAP/APAP to detect apneas when you have a mouth leak?

I don't see how it could. The flow meter would not indicate zero flow during a mouth-leak,

Looking at the leak data I can't really tell, but when I wake up with a dry mouth and fast pulse its pretty easy to figure out.

Your on-screen display indicates percent time spent in large leak, so if it's not zero that indicates that you've been mouth-leaking, or leaking somewhere.

Do you wear a chinstrap?

[TheWerkz]

Ren,
Yes I have looked at my data with Sleephead, that's what got me to thinking about open mouth with the mask. I was trying correlate the data from the night before when I knew I was mouth breathing. Like I said, it is a rare event (that I know of) when I was mouth breathing so I'm just trying to see if I do it more often than I know of.

DCwom,

If anything is going to definitively tell you whether you were mouth breathing as opposed to through your nose using nasal cushions will be the Flow Rate.

Look at your normal breathing pattern while you're zoomed-out (default view), now see if you can find a section where the breathing gets very narrow and consequently the machine will probably register an apnea event.

If you look at your normal respiratory Flow Rate it may vary from -30 to +30 (just an example) and if it starts to flat-line at 0 for over 45 seconds or maybe for minutes, this should be an indicator that you're not breathing through CPAP and the machine should be registering apnea's during the same time-frame since you were breathing through your mouth and CPAP machines only think that if you're not breathing through the hose then you're having an apnea or you're dead.

There is a possibility that you inhaled through your nose and out through your mouth or your mouth just came open and dried-out while you continued to breath through normally through your nose.

I'm also assuming you're using your REMstar Auto in "Auto" mode and not straight CPAP mode, in either case though, the Flow Rate should definitely show if you're mouth breathing and also, the pressure would increase and stay at the upper Auto pressure setting until you started breathing normally through the hose.

Look at some other Flow Rate graph's from previous day's where you believe you were only breathing through your nose and you'll get a feel for what's normal for you, it typically varies throughout the 4 cycles of sleep from Alpha through REM and there's a 5th flow rate too that's usually the heaviest, look at when you first turn the machine on until you start drifting-off to sleep, it's normally much heavier for at least a few minutes.

Ren