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May you please take a look at my charts and advise what can I do to improve my therapy?
I am on APAP since Sep. My therapy was going OK until Jan. Since then, I wake up exhausted since my sleep is interrupted although the AHI is too low.
Your results are excellent at 11.0 pressure. Your machine rarely increases pressure other than for the Philips auto CPAP algorithm which trials 1.5 cm pressure increases. You might want to try using fixed CPAP pressure to prevent these pressure changes which may be disruptive to you. Your machine also includes A-Flex and C-flex which may increase comfort. To fix pressure, just set the maximum pressure from 20 to 11 or choose CPAP mode at 11.0. Flex settings are a matter of experimentation. You try different flex settings and select the one that feels best. If you can describe how your sleep is interrupted, perhaps we can make other suggestions.
INFORMATION ON APNEA BOARD FORUMS OR ON APNEABOARD.COM SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED AS MEDICAL ADVICE. ALWAYS SEEK THE ADVICE OF A PHYSICIAN BEFORE SEEKING TREATMENT FOR MEDICAL CONDITIONS, INCLUDING SLEEP APNEA. INFORMATION POSTED ON THE APNEA BOARD WEB SITE AND FORUMS ARE PERSONAL OPINION ONLY AND NOT NECESSARILY A STATEMENT OF FACT.
Thanks, for your kind help and the insightful information. Here you are some more details about my sleep.
I started using CPAP in September and kept the same settings for a couple of months before I start feeling the therapy is not going well. Please see the chart for the changes over the months in my experiments to improve my therapy again (A: indicates the period where the setting was the best. B indicates the time when I started feeling sleep disturbance)
During Jan, I started sweating a lot while sleeping and waking up during the night for the bathroom although the device shows very low AHI.
I monitor my sleep cycles using a smartwatch (Samsung). Every night I got very little deep sleep, less than 20 minutes.
The smartwatch shows a heartbeat rate that is around 55 during sleep.
Despite the smartwatch record of my sleep cycles and heartbeat, I do not feel fresh when wake up and I spend the day exhausted. It is maybe good to mention that, I do not fall asleep during activities like driving or watching TV.
When I go to bed, I fall asleep quickly. After about three hours, I am aroused suddenly. After that, I keep waking up every hour or so. I guess something awakens me just before going into a deep sleep. Some of those cycles of sleeping and waking are very disturbed so the smartwatch does not recognize them as sleep periods!
Thanks again for taking the time to read and respond to my concerns.
Here I attach the charts of the last night where I changed the setting by decreasing the lower limit to 9 and the upper to 12. Also, I used the O2Ring for the first time and the graphs of SpO2 and PR are included. Any thoughts?
Lower minimum pressure resulted in more snores, hypopnea and obstructive events. My honest opinion is the Philips CPAP is not as comfortable as Resmed and that most of your discomfort could be resolved with the EPR feature on a Resmed Airsense 10 Autoset. Any chance your supplier will allow an exchange? Are you sure your Dreamstation is not a recalled machine?
INFORMATION ON APNEA BOARD FORUMS OR ON APNEABOARD.COM SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED AS MEDICAL ADVICE. ALWAYS SEEK THE ADVICE OF A PHYSICIAN BEFORE SEEKING TREATMENT FOR MEDICAL CONDITIONS, INCLUDING SLEEP APNEA. INFORMATION POSTED ON THE APNEA BOARD WEB SITE AND FORUMS ARE PERSONAL OPINION ONLY AND NOT NECESSARILY A STATEMENT OF FACT.
My insurance does not cover sleep therapy, so I bought the machine myself. I got a new machine when they recalled the defective models.
If you look at my previous replay, I identified the most comfortable setting I was on for weeks before the therapy becomes less comfortable and my sleep is distracted.
Thanks for the time you spent looking at my charts, and giving opinion.
Just for the sake of educating myself, are the data generated by the CPAP machines reliably accurate? I mean is there any chance that I have apnea but the machine does not detect it?
What about O2Ring? Is it accurate and produce reliable data?
The CPAP data is reliable in terms of detecting apnea, defined as a 10-second pause in breathing. What Philips does not do accurately is to look for flow limitation and reductions in respiratory flow below the apnea and hypopnea thresholds. A closer examination of the flow rate can reveal flow reductions and arousals that can lead to fatigue. Our wiki articles do a pretty good job of trying to explain what to look for and how to interpret the respiratory wave form. You might want to start with "Optimizing Therapy" linked in my signature below.
INFORMATION ON APNEA BOARD FORUMS OR ON APNEABOARD.COM SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED AS MEDICAL ADVICE. ALWAYS SEEK THE ADVICE OF A PHYSICIAN BEFORE SEEKING TREATMENT FOR MEDICAL CONDITIONS, INCLUDING SLEEP APNEA. INFORMATION POSTED ON THE APNEA BOARD WEB SITE AND FORUMS ARE PERSONAL OPINION ONLY AND NOT NECESSARILY A STATEMENT OF FACT.
