Random elevated respiratory rate

Any idea what would cause a respiratory rate to jump from around 14 to the mid to upper 40's?

I use OSCAR to track my stats, and I am having random periods of elevated respiratory rate. It' normally around 14, but for periods of 10-20 minutes the rate will more than double and go up into the 40's.

I think an episode of elevated respiration will only end because I end up waking up. The reason I think this is because I often notice on the graph that my mask pressure also drops all the way down. I will wake up throughout the night, and sometimes I will turn my machine off and on again to reset it to a lower pressure which makes it easier to get back to sleep.

I did a check back through my data and did not see anything like this. My respiratory rate seems to sit quite stable at 20. There may be some benefit in displaying the Flow Rate graph beside the Respiratory Rate graph and zooming in to see the detail. I am not a doctor, and am just guessing a bit. It may be an issue of shallow breathing so it has to be more frequent. Some people end up with a BiLevel machine that can assist breathing to some degree by using a large differential pressure between inhale and exhale. This is a bit different issue than general apnea. I don't see any apnea events during those periods of time.

If that persists, perhaps it worth a trip to your sleep doc to have it evaluated, and, if necessary, checked out via an overnight PSG in the sleep lab. You might be incurring some medical symptoms that need to be addressed. With the multiple channels of information available during an in lab study, there might be enough clues for them to get a handle on what is going on.