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+--- Thread: Doing well, help me get AHI even lower (/Thread-Doing-well-help-me-get-AHI-even-lower)
Doing well, help me get AHI even lower - brody287 - 04-01-2019
Hi there,
I've been on CPAP for about 6-7 weeks now, and I'm doing fairly well. You've probably seen me posting here now and again and I'm really enjoying getting to know the community and getting familiar with the usual advice. Which is why I'm confused. As I understand, I should be increasing my pressure to somewhere in the neighbourhood of about 2 cmH2O underneath my 95% pressure. If that's to be believed I should be somewhere between 8-9 as sleepyhead reports it as 10.34.
I raised my min pressure from 5cmH20 to 6 over two nights and had positive results.
[attachment=11082]
The results were positive right away but after a while I started having more central apneas. The day after that screenshot I had about 1.5 an hour clear airway events and .5 an hour obstructive events.
[attachment=11080]
Back at about 2 AHI I decided to start lowering the EPR as I understood that that could have an effect on the clear airway events and eliminating EPR could reduce those.
[attachment=11081]
As you can see my AHI went up and to boot I woke up bloated like crazy, just from reducing the EPR by 1cmH2O from 3 to 2! So reducing EPR is not really an option unless anybody has some tips to not get so bloated. Other than that, what should I be doing now to try and get my AHI down? 2 is on the edge. Anything above 2 I don't feel good in the morning, and anything 1 or under I feel great. So ultimately I'd like to be under 2 most of the time. What would be recommended at this point?
RE: Doing well, help me get AHI even lower - Sleeprider - 04-02-2019
It would really help if you organized the graphs to include Flow Limitations. We really don't need mask pressure since the pressure graph gives us what we need to know. Also, you have set your Y-axis to a fixed range, and it needs to be a wider range for the pressure, mask pressure and Leaks. Be sure the Y-axis is either on "autofit" or set to your full range.
Looking at these results, your leaks are essentially non-existent. In spite of the range of AHI from 0.5 to 3.0, these results are all acceptable. I think you will have better results with EPR at 2, rather than 3 as your pressure needs are quite low. I think you need a bit more minimum pressure, and with a minimum pressure of 7.0, EPR at 2 and maximum pressure of 12, I think you will find things will settle down quite a bit. Please change the graphs to include flow limitations in the future, and if there is a need to move back to EPR at 3, we will be able to see it.