For context, I am a 19y Male who has been struggling with osa for over a year now. It started off as just "a bad night of sleep" to now brain fog, visual issues (vision is just unexplainably blurry, eyes are always strained), and fatigue/sleepiness. I was diagnosed with an AHI of 7.7 back in december, and recieved my apap in december. The sleep doctor gave me the generic 4-20 range so I knew off the bat the doctors could really care less about my condiiton and just gave me a machine to charge my insurance. I started actually using the machine around new years, and till now have seen little improvement. I turned off ramp, increased the starting pressure, and used a chin strap/mouth tape to prevent mouth leaks. I would say that in the last 3 months, there have maybe been 5 days that I woke up and was like "wow, I slept ok". the remainder is still a struggle. Over time I realized that the apnea events themselves most likely not my biggest issue. For the last 1.5 months, my ahi has been <1. But I've still been feeling the same, and after looking at these charts I'm realizing I may have another issue.
My pressure settings are currently [8.7 - 13] although my machine very rarely even increases the pressure, meaning that the apnea events are likely taken care of. I am using a full face mask, and sleep on my side/back, although I make an active effort to try sleeping on my side. My ipr is set at 2. I notice that I have frequent events as seen in the first image. Some sort of increased respiratory effort, which I am 100% certain is fragmenting my sleep. It occurs every 10-15 mins -ish as seen in the second image. This trend lasts through the whole night, which I've noticed in all 3 months of my data. A full set of data with these "events" are seen in the last image. I am almost certain that this is disturbing my sleep and resulting in the same symptoms that I've been experiencing before. My dreams still feel fragmented and I wake up feeling as if I stayed up the whole night. The machine itself does not flag these sort of events and so I'm sure the machine isn't responding to the disturbance. If anyone has any experience with anything that looks similar to this, please advise me on what to do. Increase pressure? Decrease pressure? IPR? Any insight is helpful, as this is single-handedly crushing my quality of life. I'm not worried about the actual apnea events as the machine is able to mitigate those now. I'm sure that addressing these small respiratory distrubances so that my breathing is stable throughout the night will result in a world of a difference! Thank you guys for reading. If you have any questions please let me know.
the data from the images is (0.0 AI, 0.0 HI, 0.0 AHI, OAI 0.0, CAI 0.0, RERA 0.0, SNI 0.0). So my data is "perfect" but I suspect there's underlying issues not picked up by the machine, from what I mentioned above.
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- Image 2.PNG (57.88 KiB) Viewed 1578 times
- Image 4.PNG (27.45 KiB) Viewed 1578 times
