Hey guys,
After a long hiatus from this forum, I have some information to add. Talking to a sleep doctor and showing them my OSCAR charts did confirm the notion that those minute vent / TV graphs were abnormal, deeming a further titration study necessary (thank god).
At the sleep study, I got a 2nd and 3rd opinion from the sleep technicians who confirmed the abnormality in my graphs. The completed titration showed that my optimal settings are:
Mode: Auto Bipap
Min EPAP: 9 cm H2O
Max IPAP: 16 cm H2O
PS: 5
After asking, they confirmed that an equivalent of a
Medium trigger setting was used in the lab.
The preliminary report stated that "scattered Centrals were observed, primarily after arousals."
I will be getting my full report sometime this week, which I will share with you all as soon as I can.
As soon as I knew what my optimal settings were, I set them up on my machine, only to notice my AHI jumping to 6.39 as a result of having a CI of 5.08.
Knowing that raising the trigger setting could help with Centrals I tried one night of medium, high, and very high respectively just to get some data.
Here are the results for each trigger setting:
Medium:
High:
Very High:
What are the observations any of you can make from this? The first thing I notice is that the medium night seems to have "wider" flow rate graphs, but a fairly unstable TV / RR, while very high seems to have fairly long periods of flow limitation (upon closer inspection) but a more stable TV / RR.
The reason I ask is I'd like to continue testing these settings (for at least a week or 2 at each setting) with a priority for settings that would most likely improve sleep quality. I understand this might be a very vague question with no clear answer, but I understand that experienced members on this forum generally know what sleep-breathing issues to avoid.
One thing to add is I've been mouth-breathing pretty heavily. My humidity is maxed out with a heated hose (still lower than what would cause rainout) and I wake up just to get water because my mouth is extremely dry. I've been using the AirTouch f20 as my mask. For the past month, I've been taking Flonase and desloratadine daily for my nasal congestion, taking Flonase daily for even longer than that.
PS:
I would also like to mention, that I've been having the idea to use a machine learning algorithm that will take in an oscar graph, and more accurately detect periods of flow limitations as well as RERAS. This will require a large amount of sample data, which means I'll need the support of everyone on this forum. If I have the time to pursue this project, I will develop some kind of program that will allow you guys to retrieve sample data and deem each waveform as flow limited/normal.
Hopefully, this program would support members of this forum to titrate their devices for optimal sleep quality.