Sleep Apnoea and CPAP

Really?

Jayses... might try that..

Would probably rid me of the wife and protect me from vampires too eh?

😀😁😃

Should read July 2023😁

Took me 2 months to get used to it, but was worth it on the end. I have the same weight profile as you and eventual target. Good luck!

I work in the North so got my machine on the NHS. Have been back to the clinic with it twice, and had a tech out twice.

Fed up with it at this stage. Wife says the snoring is almost gone, certainly not enough to disturb her sleep. And the breathing issues are also nearly gone. So I'm just going to keep plugging away with the weight loss and then get assessed again.

So I had my final meeting with a consultant yesterday, to get results of my sleep study done a couple of months back.

I have very mild apnea.

He said they measure it on a scale of 0 -5 for nothing to worry about, 5 - 10 for mild, 10 - 15 for moderate, and 15 - 20 for severe.

I was 5.1.

So basically he says that's me done. No need for a cpap machine. He did advise I could see a dentist about getting a mandibular device, which should help low level problems like mine.

Not sure what to do. Still extremely exhausted every morning I wake, irrespective of how much sleep I get. The tech who saw me for an interview before the sleep study said that some people don't show a high count on the device as they are very active and would be fit, and the device often wouldn't pick up occasions of breathing stopping. Might follow up on that.

But looks like it is back to gp to see if there's any more checks that could be done.

This is very hard. I have some of these issues and would not want more.

There could be a couple of things going on together here. When the machine did no good, did its own stats suggest that it was doing good?

There is some discussion earlier in this thread. There is a measure of sleep apneas per hour, if the sleep test showed over 30 then you have a severe problem. The machine reduces this and reports a number, people here report numbers like 2 or 3 which means that the machine should do good, below 5 is "normal". I get around 2, which would be fine if I could keep the mask on most of the night, which I cannot always do. The LED has this info and the SD card should have produced a report with this data. I have a machine which send this data automatically from a SIM card.

I'd speak to the company about understanding the data. If this shows that it should work then there may be other things affecting sleep and they could be addressed in a different way, one by one.

As I understand it, machines have a "prescription" from the consultant. The companies don't change this without medical input.

Have you a consultant? Who put you on the machine? I take my SD card to my consultant every year and he analyses the stats and adjusts the machine accordingly. Someone has to be monitoring you

I did the Study once in the beginning ... and that diagnosed me that I needed to go the CPAP avenue.

I now just see the consultant once a year to review the SD Card and have a chat on any queries I might have.

I reckon you should go back to your Consultant and chat about your problems and take it from there...... am sure he will get you back on the right path again

I have a Resmed machine which links itself to the internet. It keeps track of my apnoeas, time asleep, mask fit (leakage) etc. Every morning it sends a message to my phone to say what my stats were for the previous night. When I go to the consultant they can just draw down the stats, which I believe are more in depth than the ones I get daily, onto their computer. This is much more effective than the previous system of taking the SD card to consultations, I can track progress over time.

It shows apneas per hour, for the time you are wearing the mask. So, if you lie awake with the mask on for an hour say, that counts as an hour's sleep, but because you are not asleep it shows 0 events. As the overnight total is achieved by adding the score for every hour and dividing by the number of hours this 'awake hour' dilutes the number of apnoeas. I have woken in the night and the machine has been showing, say, over 30, but by morning this number is averaged out and it might show the overnight number as, say, 10.

As I understand it, it works like this. You have the highest number of apnoeas as you go into deeper sleep, the concentrated high number means that you are not getting that deep sleep, and often if you have mask problems it is in this phase that you wake with high leakage, so that's another reason why you are not getting the deep sleep. If anyone knows any different I would be interested to hear.

I have occasionaly worn an oxymeter overnight both with and without the mask. Without the mask my blood oxygen levels go extremely low, into the 70s occasionally, whereas with the mask, even with a high number of apnoeas the levels don't drop below the 80s (which is still low).

I would like to discuss this with the consultant, but I have only just found a consultant who is actually taking a flicker of interest in more than taking money off me. Even then he does not really seem to take account of the fact that a person with SA problems is likely to be dozy and not communicating in the most coherent way, especially having travelled a considerable distance to the appointment and all the associated stress of travelling. I intend to take some of these questions written down to my next appointment, I can write much more coherently than I can talk.

Incidentally, do cpap machine wearers realise that the machine and masks are claimable under the drug repayment scheme?

I am using 10. It just uses the broadband connection to an ap called 'My Patient Space'. Worked fine even when there was virtually no connection in that room, got a better connection now.

Thanks, yes these have already been checked. It does sometimes seem as though 'chat amongst ourselves' is as helpful as the consultant type advice out there, though this is not normally the approach I would take.

For anyone interested a lady just diagnosed 10 days ago rang liveline very worried, Doctor spoke of blindness, stroke and death. I was blinded by the couple of times I used the machine.

A good few people rang in to reassure her.

I’m listening to it on podcast now on Spotify and it’s interesting some got studies at home and one man came off machine as apneas came down.

Joe kept interrupting her because she wasn’t quick enough to respond wish I could have rang in to say that’s part of it Joe give her a chance.

Sad callers say there’s no cure because I hope there is.

They talking about a dental procedure now.