RE: My AHI keeps going back up :/
Thanks richb. Here's my data from last night. The last few nights my AHI has been around 2 so there aren't many groups of events but I zoomed in on a couple of places where some are shown and added them at the end of the image.
Also attaching my sleep study info that I did in January when my exhaustion was worse. It was an in-home study (just had a couple of thin hose prongs in my nose and a pulse-ox monitor) and if I'm reading this correctly, shows almost no CAs or OAs. It put my AHI at 8.5 My first night with my CPAP 5 weeks ago showed an AHI of 13 with 43 CAs, 47 HYP, and only 4 OAs. The different types have swapped places all the time over the last month.
I don't have any info on titration of my machine. I just bought it and started studying up and doing my best.
My current plan is to try to keep my ahi around 2 or lower for a couple of weeks and if there's no improvement I'll go see the cardiologist. I'm very fit and my resting pulse is around 60 and my blood pressure is good and my basic blood work was all normal.
Thanks!
RE: My AHI keeps going back up :/
Michael, could you click on the calendar an minimize that please? I'd like to see the tidal volume stats at the bottom of the charts and that calendar doesn't give any useful information.
Do you feel like your inhalation is cut-off by the machine pressure?
RE: My AHI keeps going back up :/
As luck would have it, last night was a 5.3, so I have a few more clusters I can show. With tidal volume visible. Thanks.
No, I actually sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if my machine is off, because I have no discomfort breathing at all.
RE: My AHI keeps going back up :/
Interesting stuff, especially the I:E timing, but I still don't know how to improve. Nothing looks too serious, just a busy chart. Have you ever tried higher Flex settings?
RE: My AHI keeps going back up :/
What's I:E timing? I had Flex at 2 for a while and then moved it to 1 for the last few weeks. I was thinking about turning it off, as I have heard lower is generally better?
RE: My AHI keeps going back up :/
Inhale : Exhale ratio is the time spent in inhale as compared to exhale. In your most recently posted graph the average is 3.24:1.00 (or 3 to 1). We don't really know the importance of I:E ratio to CPAP therapy, but a normal I:E ratio is considered to be in a range of 1.0:1.0 to 1.0 to 1.0:3.0 (read the colon as "to"). What I see in the graph is a rapid exhale followed by a rebound the machine erroneously picks up as the beginning of inhale. If you zoom in on the flow line you will see the exhale actually continues to the end of zero flow until the inhale really shows positive volume.
It's not alarming, and is for me more of a curiosity; however I have observed an anecdotal correlation between people that seem to have more events, and take longer to adapt to CPAP, and those that show this "inverse" I:E ratio. I:E ratio can also be expressed as a fraction I/E where values less than 1 are a normal inhale shorter duration than exhale. If you research I:E ratio, you will see it is really only researched and used in mechanical ventilation, not in CPAP. I think the CPAP machines actually produce a lot of errors in reporting this especially when leaks are present.