Many OA's and neck/shoulder pain

[sfgiants123]

Hi folks, 

I have been on cpap for over a year now and it seems that my therapy goes up and down like a roller coaster. I will have fantastic sleep with great oscar data for months on end and then out of nowhere it will be months on end with poor sleep and oscar data to back it up. I am really not sure why this happens as I keep most of my life variables pretty constant. I was having pretty bad tmj jaw pain a few months back so I switched for side sleeping to back sleeping and at first my oscar data did not change at all. But now it has taken a poor turn and I seem to have nights with many obstructive events but flow limits seem ok. I have learned a lot about reading the oscar date over the past year but still by no means do I feel confident in my ability to interpert the data.  Is it normal to need to adjust pressures often? It seems my current cpap settings can produce great sleep as well as awful sleep. It is really quite confusing. I use a nasal pillow mask and mouth tape. I am going to attach 2 oscar nights of sleep with same setting yes different outcomes and maybe someone can give some suggestions on any tweaks i could make. Thank you all.

[freakyfrog]

I think the first step would be trying to solve the high leak rate. It can interfere with therapy

[Deborah K.]

Your leak rate is not high enough to mess with your therapy.  That's why the panel to the left of the chart shows your leak rate as 0.0.

You do have some positional apnea.  This is where there are apneas clustered together.  Yours are not terrible, but they do make your AHI higher than they need to be, causing sub-optimal therapy.  These are caused by your chin dropping towards your chest, causing a bend in your airway, like a kink in a hose.  If you sleep on two pillows, drop to one.  If your pillow is thick, try a thinner one.  If these don't help you may consider buying a soft cervical collar.  When I needed one I tried a bunch of them but liked the Caldera Releaf Collar, available on Amazon, the best by far.  I ended up using a certain type of child's pillow, but it's up to you what you want to do.