why is my Respiratory rate high?

[koy23]

I'm 6ft 250lbs male.
My symptoms is arousals when dreaming with pounding/racing heart beat which i'm taking a bunch of meds to sedate me/slow heart beat.
I was reading more about tidal volume, minute vent and respiratory rate.

It looks like I'm within range for TD, MV, but i have high RR.
Anyone knows why from graphs AND what can I do about it?

appreciated.

[Heracles]

My symptoms is arousals when dreaming with pounding/racing heart beat 

This may be up to 100% psychological and emotional. Do you remember anything about your dreams ? Is there a pattern that comes back more often than others ?

In the same way, it can be physiological... When your body ends up with not enough oxygen, it triggers some alerts in the nervous system. For some, the arousal is enough to restore breathing but not enough to gain consciousness. In your case, your reaction to this internal alert could be severe enough to bring you back to consciousness.

Here, I never under estimate the power of the mind. As such, I would search a little around this. My girlfriend is out of a terrible period of 20+ years of spousal abuse. For months, she had nightmares after nightmares. She always wake up without remembering anything about them, other that they were nightmares. The thing is, she often speaks will sleeping. That way, by hearing what she says, I am often able to identify the object of her nightmare and help her about the subject. Once, I actually let her in her nightmare deliberately until I understood enough to find out what she was having nightmares about. Often, after that, that specific kind of nightmare goes. Unfortunately, others come behind but we are now to a point where she has less and less of them.

Also, know that some (many) sleep medication are known to induce nightmares. My idea is that without the pills, the person does not sleep deep enough to have these nightmares. With the medication, deep sleep is reached but because the mind remains focussed on the trauma, what is reached in deep sleep ends up to be nightmares. As such, these medications may more reveal nightmares then creating them.

In all cases, I wish you the best.

[Jeff8356]

koy23,

Other more knowledgeable members than me should be along at some point...

I noticed you have a fair amount of excessive leaks which happen to (mostly) coincide with your higher respiratory rate.  Getting those leaks under control would be a helpful.  Then see what you RR looks like.  Anything over 24l/min is considered a "large leak" and your machine can no longer provide adequate therapy.  Your leaks exceed that in many cases.

I also noticed you are using OSCAR 1.3.0 which is an older version.  The latest version is 1.4.0 so it may be time to upgrade.

[Sleeprider]

If you zoom into the flow rate graph where the inspiration rate is high, you are going to see a very irregular respiration rate with a lot of bumps in the inspiration. Each of those is being counted as a separate breath. The first thing we will try is higher pressure support setting, or more precisely, separation between EPAP and IPAP to hopefully overcome the flow limitation. Even though your machine is not seeing flow limits, they are severe. Go ahead and provide a zoom of your graphs at 3-4 minutes so we can see the individual flow rate waves. Have you ever used pressure support? Why do you have a bilevel machine? I suspect this is another case of not keeping therapy threads together so we can see your past settings and results, and that you have had centrals in the past.

Edit: of course. This did not used to be a problem for you. A good starting place might be to go back to these settings, but you've been doing a lot of "dial winging".

[koy23]

I know it might seem like that, but i have been experimenting for a long time changing one variable at a time, and with Vauto, CPAP, i bound my arousals are still less with the Bipap-S
You can see the zoomed in screenshot, the statistics.
thanks for making me notice the RR in previous nights where it is better (20's) but my arousals are more still. You can see I tried PS 1 to 4 for flow limits, but i did not sleep better, it looks like my body responded better with less "changes" that is why i tend to keep EPAP and IPAP same most of this year, i think i picked BiPAP bc of the easy breath made the exhale easier than the CPAP mode .
I'm using the F30 mask now with PAD-A-Cheek to reduce leaks as much as I could.

I don't have nightmares, but the arousals seem to happen always waking from a normal dream with the heart racing sensation for 10-20 secs. I even measured my BPM in those 20 secs and it was 60-70 bpm which should be not felt, but that is what i feel, heart shaking with very fast pulse.

[koy23]

some more SCs, i didn't know how to combine threads though.

[koy23]

This may be up to 100% psychological and emotional. Do you remember anything about your dreams ? Is there a pattern that comes back more often than others ?

In the same way, it can be physiological... When your body ends up with not enough oxygen, it triggers some alerts in the nervous system. For some, the arousal is enough to restore breathing but not enough to gain consciousness. In your case, your reaction to this internal alert could be severe enough to bring you back to consciousness.

Here, I never under estimate the power of the mind. As such, I would search a little around this. My girlfriend is out of a terrible period of 20+ years of spousal abuse. For months, she had nightmares after nightmares. She always wake up without remembering anything about them, other that they were nightmares. The thing is, she often speaks will sleeping. That way, by hearing what she says, I am often able to identify the object of her nightmare and help her about the subject. Once, I actually let her in her nightmare deliberately until I understood enough to find out what she was having nightmares about. Often, after that, that specific kind of nightmare goes. Unfortunately, others come behind but we are now to a point where she has less and less of them.

Also, know that some (many) sleep medication are known to induce nightmares. My idea is that without the pills, the person does not sleep deep enough to have these nightmares. With the medication, deep sleep is reached but because the mind remains focussed on the trauma, what is reached in deep sleep ends up to be nightmares. As such, these medications may more reveal nightmares then creating them.

In all cases, I wish you the best.

I don't have nightmares, but the arousals seem to happen always waking from a normal dream (i remember the dream) with the heart racing sensation for 10-20 secs. I even measured my BPM in those 20 secs and it was 60-70 bpm which should be not felt, but that is what i feel, heart shaking with very fast pulse.

[Sleeprider]

In this image, your respiration rate is about 18 BPM, so is being reported incorrectly by a factor of about 2X. The chart starts off with severe flow limitation and low respiratory volume, then suddenly becomes recovery breathing with high amplitude flow rates, slowly returning to normal, then what appears to be a movement and  flow limited at 03:20. The apneal at 03:23:40 appears to grow out of obstruction.  I think it is likely we are looking at positional flow limitation, which is not helped by the lack of pressure support.

[koy23]

thanks for the analysis, so last night I tried to set a PS=1 on bipap-S, EPAP=11.6 and IPAP=12.6
Although the RR is still high, i feel that i had less arousals and slept better.
This is a different result of when i set the machine to Vauto on (9-18 screenshot) where i slept much worse had so many arousals.
 Do you think i could tweak last night result to better sleep?

I can't do anything more about the leaks than what I already did.

[Brazen]

What do you mean, you "can't do anything more about the leaks..."?
If you are consistently having large leaks you are not getting effective treatment or even accurate data from the machine. Adjusting settings with large leaks is like 
shooting blind.

It's possible the F30 just isn't a good mask shape for your face or you're overtightening it, or a handful of other possible reasons for leaks.
Finding a comfortable mask and managing leaks can take a lot of expensive trial and error but it can't be ignored if you want to optimize your treatment. 

I use the F30 and found I had to loosen the straps a bit - the cushion has to be able to billow out with the pressure in order to seal. I put the mask on, machine on, and then I pull the mask away from my face so the cushion can expand. Then I adjust the straps just tight enough to hold the mask in that spot. 
I have very little leak with that mask. Ymmv.