Has Treating your Apnea helped morning headaches?

I wake up every day with a bad headache right between my eyes usually off to one side or the other a bit. Has treated your sleep apnea helped anyone with morning headaches? Thanks so much!

Absolutely... they went away very quickly after starting Cpap.

Before I began use of CPAP many years ago I had headaches every morning. After just a couple of nights I stopped having headaches, and I have never experienced a single headaches i the nearly 30 years that I have used CPAP. Aside from the numerous other benefits, absence of headaches alone would cause me to continue using my machine!! My original sleep doctor at Washington University assured me that morning headaches were a common problem for apnea patients.

TheDuke

Same here.
With this awsome feedback, my compliance has always been effortless.

I'm just curious, where on your head did the morning headaches hurt?

My morning headaches pretty much disappeared soon after starting CPAP.

I used to start each day with 2 paracetamol tablets (tylenol). Now, I rarely need them.

Tesseract wrote:I wake up every day with a bad headache right between my eyes usually off to one side or the other a bit. Has treated your sleep apnea helped anyone with morning headaches? Thanks so much!

It looks like you've been a member here for a few years, has this always been an issue? If so then it sounds like your therapy wasn't/isn't set up correctly, assuming the headaches are related to OSA. Are you having daytime sleepiness? When did you last have a sleep study? Can you tell us a bit more and perhaps provide us with some Sleepyhead graphs so that we can see if you're getting the best therapy for yourself.

Yes, cpap eliminated my headaches within a few days. However, it turned out that my headaches had multiple causes, one that was damaging my eyesight. If after a couple of weeks your headaches do not go away, I suggest you see your primary doctor and discuss with him/her other possible causes of headaches. While my illness is considered rare, there are more common things that are concerning that cause chronic headaches.

I had been using cpap well from 2013 until September 2016 and I haven't used it much since then. I didn't work in 2016 due to chronic migraine 5 to 7 days per week. I moved to an extended stay hotel and things got better so I moved to a brand new condo at the end of January of 2017. Migraines got better but I've also been treated for 6 sinus infections in the past year so I haven't been able to use my cpap. I have anxiety and OCD issues too so I am switching to a dental device until I get the sinus issues cleared up. The antibiotics give me really bad anxiety also and that interferes with sleep. I had a CT scan done and will meet with my ENT to see if I need to have balloon sinoplasty. I still have bad headaches every day but the really bad puking migraines are reduced to 1 to 2 days per month. The problem now is that I wake up most days with my nose swelled shut and wake up with a bad headache between my eyes more toward my left eye. I have TMJ issues also but they are not as bad as they used to be.

When I kept having back to back sinus infections, my doctor sent me to an allergy specialist. I lived in Texas at the time, and I was allergic to mesquite trees. When I moved to the Los Angeles area, I went through testing again, and found I was allergic to coastal live oak, the most common tree in the area. I moved to the high desert, and found I was allergic to Russian thistle (tumble weed). After having shot therapy for several years because of my many moves, I finally got my allergies under control, and seldom have sinus infections (one or two a year at the most).

I don't remember that well. It has been seven years; and apparently they were hypoxic headaches--
or at least the type cpap helps eliminate.
I still can have a sinus headache, but that responds to OTC sinus remedies.

I recently found out the level of treatment is important also. I was considered good by the doctors with an AHI in the 2.5 to 5 range. I still felt horrible most days under their guidance. Very frequently had morning headaches. The forum members helped me get my AHI down to around 1 most nights and I haven't had a morning headache since. The long list of physical and mental health problems I was having either improved greatly or resolved.

Thanks for the encouragement. I meet with my Dentist today to get measured or a mold taken for the apnea mouth guard and hopefully, I will get some relief from that. My anxiety is just too high and with my nose swelling shut at night whether I use the CPAP or don't use it, I just can't take using my auto pap right now and the dental device will be better than nothing. I haven't been able to use my cpap for a year and a half or so due to insomnia and anxiety.

One of the things I was told at my 60 day follow-up was that it is way more important to pay attention to how your feel and how rete you are than to focus on numbers. Unfortunately, the PA had previously said that I should not change my pressure setting because that's a prescription item. I pointed out the only way to manage how I felt was by judiciously changing the pressure(s), she just said to be very careful in changing the settings. I also pointed out that the numbers she had just said looked really great were 0.8 cm H2O higher than the prescription. I win. As I was leaving she thanked me for showing her some things on Sleepyhead, spreadsheets and Rescan that she did not know. I did appreciate here attitude mostly.

I do understand the caution to not willy-nilly start changing settings, but you need to control your therapy and follow how you feel and use numbers for verification of doing the right thing.