CPAP Week One.

[matt0matic]

Good morning All,

Learning more than I thought I'd want to when I was first going to the hurdles of getting the study and CPAP. And I'm glad a community like this is here to help! So thank you!

I'm just closing up my first week of therapy.
Initially had the CPAP set to 8-18 and a EPR of 2 as recived from the DME.
Most recently changed to 7.6-16 and EPR of 3, along with some temp/humidity settings to comfort and removed the ramping feature.

My main concern is aerophagia- and if there are adjustments I should consider to reduce this.

And please give any input on the snips below:
'Hypopnea #1', about a minute before the event am I about to have a CA prior to the hypopnea event?
'RERA #1' it seems the same minute before the event I'm about to have a CA and induce a OA before the RERA?

[matt0matic]

Edit fixing image format and added prior nights overall snips.

[matt0matic]

Sleep study.

[staceyburke]

about the only thing you can do to lessen aerophagia is to lower the max.  That could of course increase the obstructive events.  Give it a try and see how your numbers are and how you feel with less max pressure.

[gainerfull]

It looks like you've got a pretty constant leak for the entire night which could be impacting your therapy. Do you hear / notice any leaks? If not, you may try the mask 10% tighter tonight and if the leaks don't cease then you could be opening your mouth while you sleep so you'd want to consider mouth tape. Once you get the leaks to stop or at least become less frequent then we can evaluate what pressure the cpap machine needs to go to solve your breathing issues. An AHI below 1 is stellar! How do you feel after a week of therapy?

[matt0matic]

about the only thing you can do to lessen aerophagia is to lower the max.  That could of course increase the obstructive events.  Give it a try and see how your numbers are and how you feel with less max pressure.

And that's doing a titration? Start lowering the max pressure until AHI's become unacceptable? I think I'd like to give it a try.

It looks like you've got a pretty constant leak for the entire night which could be impacting your therapy. Do you hear / notice any leaks? If not, you may try the mask 10% tighter tonight and if the leaks don't cease then you could be opening your mouth while you sleep so you'd want to consider mouth tape. Once you get the leaks to stop or at least become less frequent then we can evaluate what pressure the cpap machine needs to go to solve your breathing issues. An AHI below 1 is stellar! How do you feel after a week of therapy?

Is there an acceptable leak rate? I hear a lot now that the CPAP is running, there is air 'venting' from the top of the N30i mask, it does not feel like there is air leaking around my nose/nostrals, but I hear it leaking from the vent in the pillow itself. I will give the tape a go and see if that changes the numbers, my fiancée states that I'm keeping my mouth closed during sleep (and its painfully funny when I unknowingly try to talk with the nasal mask on and the air escapes as soon as I open my mouth to talk). 

And as far a feeling. not much change yet because getting to sleep has been a struggle, but I'm optimistic for these next few weeks as I become accustom to the head gear.

[Heracles]

Actually, you AHI may improve by lowering the maximum pressure.

The higher the pressure, the harder it is for you to breath against the machine. As such, you may end up not breathing enough or correctly because of that. Here, my girl friend's numbers and results in February were not that good and it looked like her max was too low. I tried to increase it a little and she started to do aerophagia. I re-lowered it and her AHI came back better.