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Too much air pressure?

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tbach +0 points · over 5 years ago Original Poster

How do you know when the air pressure is too high? Spent another weird night trying to figure out what's going on.

Had to restart my CPAP a couple of times last night in order to get the pressure low enough to fall asleep. The pressure was literally blowing up my mouth like a balloon. Beginning to wonder whether there is something wrong with my machine. Lowered pressure for tonight, and I'll see what happens.

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bonjour +0 points · over 5 years ago Sleep Commentator

The issue is your tongue is coming off the roof of your mouth opening your airway to both your mouth and nose. I do understand that some are more sensitive than others to the "pressure". The objection is usually more to the flow than the pressure. How much pressure are we talking about? An easy experiment is to get a tall glass of water, 8 inches is ideal, and a straw. Put the straw in the glass to the bottom and blow bubbles. THAT is the MAX pressure your machine is capable of, 20 cmw. It really is not much. To recommend a setting to start at we would need to find the pressure taht triggers this and then slowly raise pressures back to your optimum therapeutic pressure.

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Sierra +0 points · over 5 years ago Sleep Patron

I believe you are using an AirSense 10 AutoSet with a maximum pressure of 15 cm. Is that correct?

About the only realistic way to determine if pressure is correct is to view the data using SleepyHead. Then you can compare when you are having apnea incidents to what the treatment pressure was at that point during the night. You can also determine if the machine may be raising the air pressure unnecessarily. If you copy the data from your SD card to SleepyHead and do a screen capture of the daily report, then post it here, then we can give you an opinion on what may be going on.

Also if you have EPR set to full time, the pressure may be going higher than it needs to.

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