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nk3125 - Therapy Thread - Printable Version

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nk3125 - Therapy Thread - nk3125 - 02-26-2024

Hi everyone,

I was recently diagnosed with mild OSA based on a WatchPAT sleep study (pAHI 3%=2.4, pRDI=11.6, pAHIc 3%=1.5, no CSR, supine RDI=14.1, non-supine RDI=8.5). I believe this would fall into the category of UARS. I was prescribed APAP 4-20cm and got an AirSense 10 AutoSet a couple of weeks ago. After a bit of a rough start with masks, I finally found the N30i seems to work well for me (knock on wood).

I am a 32 year old male with previous diagnosis of a deviated septum and large turbinates. I currently take Flonase and Astepro to help mitigate nasal congestion. I had a previous history with migraines, but I've been using Breathe Right strips for the last 10 years, which has eliminated most of my headache symptoms. I initially sought out a sleep study due to excess tiredness during the day. 

Now, I'm looking to optimize my therapy a bit. Since my AHI wasn't high to begin with (and my understanding is that these machines don't flag RERAs accurately), I think I need to be optimizing around flow limitations and reducing arousals. I've attached the six recommended OSCAR graphs below from last night.

My reported flow limitations seem low (0.01 95%), but I'm noticing a lot of areas where the inhalation phase is a bit bumpy or plateaus and the machine isn't tagging that as a flow limitation.

A few questions I had looking through my own data:

  1. Should I worry much about areas of apparent flow limitation if the machine isn't flagging it as flow limitation?
  2. Can the choice of mask impact flow limitations? I noticed many more flow limitations being tagged by the machine when using the N20 compared to either the P30i or the N30i that I'm using currently.
  3. What counts as an arousal? I'm noticing areas where I have one or two large breaths and then goes back to normal
  4. Any setting changes that would be recommended? Based on other threads, I narrowed my pressure range and enabled full-time EPR=3 to try to reduce the flow limitations.
I really appreciate anyone taking a look at this. Thanks! 

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