- Gday guys, Nicko from CPAP reviews,
it's great to be with you but firstly,
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Now today I'm gonna do a little video on humidification
it's a really important aspect of CPAP therapy,
and one that I think a lot of people get confused with
well I know they do because I get a whole lot of emails
every winter,
I thought I'd do a little video just explaining
what humidified air is,
so a little bit about the science behind it
to give you a bit of an understanding
and also talk about CPAP humidifiers
and the problems people have with them
and the benefits of them as well.
So humidified air is basically just normal air
with moisture in it.
Obviously when the water heats up, it turns to vapor
and then that vapor gets carried in the air.
So one thing about humidified air
is the hotter the air is the more moisture content
it can hold as vapor.
Alright so if you've been to anywhere in the tropics,
normally they have quite humid air, it's quite dense air,
it's full of a lot of moisture vapor in the air.
Now the colder the air gets,
the less moisture it can hold in the air.
And that's how we kind of get rain at the end of the day.
And it also leads to a phenomenon in CPAP therapy
called rainout, which I'll talk about later.
But basically the colder that air gets,
the less moisture content it can hold in the air.
So it's important to understand those two aspects
of humidity.
So why do we actually need a humidifier
with CPAP therapy anyway?
Well, under normal circumstances, you know,
so just normal natural breathing,
your nose here acts as a humidifier, believe it or not.
So as we breathe in through our nose,
as that air travels through our nasal cavity,
and down into our upper respiratory
and then down into our lungs,
our nose actually warms up the air
and makes breathing more comfortable
and it just protects the soft delicate linings of,
you know your upper respiratory tract,
your throat, your nasal cavity, your lungs and so forth.
So, your nose is acting as a humidifier
under normal circumstances.
But when we start using CPAP therapy
that increase airflow through the nose
overwhelms the nose's natural ability
to provide humidification.
It's like hanging your washing out on a windy day,
it just dries everything out.
Okay, so that air is moving too fast
for the nose to be able to heat it up
and add a bit of moisture to it.
And because of that,
we get a few side effects happening in there.
So firstly we get dryness,
so we can get dryness in our nose,
in our throat, we get sore throats,
we can get crack lips,
we can get infections, blood noses,
there's a whole bunch of sort of nasty little consequence
that happen when we're using Positive Airway Pressure
if we're not going to use a humidifier.
Now, it doesn't happen to everyone
but majority of people who don't use a humidifier
report these sort of side effects
just because the body's natural ability
is overwhelmed by the amount of airflow.
Now another thing that happens is
because the air pressure is so high
as it passes through the nose and it dries it out,
it causes congestion.
The congestion is basically
a shrinking of the airway passages in the nose,
so the diameter of your nasal passages becomes narrow,
you would have had blocked noses before that's congestion,
you know, was it's hard to breathe in.
So that cold dry air that's passing through our nose
causes the congestion.
And if your nasal passages shrink,
it's harder to get air in through your nose
so we end up breathing a lot more through our mouth.
So we get mouth leaks, we end up breathing through our mouth
cause we can't get the air in through our nose.
And what that does,
it sort of increases the dryness even more,
because instead of being able to get that air
through our humidifier, our nose,
we end up bringing it in through our mouth,
which isn't a humidifier.
And so the air is a lot more drier even more.
So it's sort of just like a negative feedback cycle,
it just increases that dryness even more.
Alright guys, now I'm gonna quickly talk about
CPAP humidifiers,
what they are, how they work,
and also how to change some of those settings
that are gonna help you out with your CPAP humidification.
So for those of you new to CPAP therapy,
a CPAP humidifier is basically a little water chamber
that sits on a heated plate.
And we can control that heated plate with the settings
so the hotter that hated plate gets, the hotter that gets,
then the more moisture content is created,
the more humidification we get in the air.
So if we're getting a dry throat
maybe we're getting you know dry mouth, sore nose
struggling to breathe through our nose,
we need to add a bit of moisture to the air
so you can check your humidification settings
on your machine
and you can increase those settings
to provide more humidification
which is gonna alleviate some of those symptoms
associated with the dryness.
Now one issue that you're probably gonna run into
at some stage with your CPAP therapy,
I'm gonna talk a little bit about this now
is a little dilemma we call rainout,
which is when that nice warm humidified air
starts condensating and starts turning into water droplets
which can gather in your tube and start gurgling.
There're can be spitting on your face,
and it's just a really annoying aspect of CPAP therapy.
So what's happening in this scenario is
remember in the beginning of the video
I said that cold air can't hold a lot of moisture.
Really hot air can hold a lot of moisture, cold air can't
so when air gets cold, it gets rid of its moisture content,
it condensates and we get those water droplets.
If we're getting water droplets building up in our tube
we can either increase the air temperature
so that air can hold more moisture,
or we can reduce the level of moisture in the air.
So decreasing the humidification settings.
It's a bit of a balancing act,
and I think this is where people get really stuck
because they don't quite understand
how it all fits together, okay?
So now each CPAP manufacturer
has its own humidification system,
and some of you with the more high-end machines
might have an integrated heated tube system
with your device.
If you don't have an integrated heated tube system
with your device,
I highly recommend that you go out and get yourself
this little device here, which is called
a Universal Hybernite Heated Tube System.
They're not that expensive,
and basically that will enable you to add a heated tube
to your humidifier no matter what machine you've got.
It's really great.
Another thing I recommend you get is a little tube wrap.
This is just an insulated tube cover
that you can wrap around your tube.
Basically, it's got a zip, and you put your tube in here,
and that adds another level of insulation
to your CPAP tube.
And that's gonna keep that cold air off your tube
and that way keep that air inside the tube nice and warm
and the warmer the air,
the more water we can add to the air,
the more humidification.
If you have an integrated heated tube system
built into your machine already,
you're probably gonna have two different settings
you can run with the machine.
One will be like an automatic climate control setting
where when you're changing that humidification setting
the level of water,
it will automatically be adjusting
the tube temperature for you.
The other one will be more of a manual mode.
And in that scenario, basically we can determine
the level of humidification independently of the heated tube
so we can control a,
the how hot that heater plate is getting
and b,
how hot that tube is getting.
So this is gonna give you more control.
Because those auto settings,
they're great for most of the time,
but sometimes you wanna have that control
of that heated tube independently of your humidifier.
So in a scenario where, let's just say where very dry,
so we need a lot of moisture in the air,
we need a high humidity level,
but we're also getting a lot of rainout,
we're getting a lot of condensation happening,
which is annoying the crap out of us.
In that scenario,
we don't really wanna drop our water content
or humidification level
because it's just gonna remove the moisture that we need.
So what we've got to do in that scenario is
we've gotta heat up the air
and we're gonna heat that up
so that air can hold that amount of moisture in it
and keep it as vapor.
And to do that, we've gotta crank up
that heated tube system if we've got one, okay?
So crank up the heated tube system,
wrap it in a tube cozy
which is gonna keep the cold atmospheric air off the tube.
Maybe keep it under our blanket as well, we can do that
we could heat our room temperature,
heating our room temperature as well, just crap,
just take the chill off the room
with a little bit of a heater.
Keep our machine nice and low to the ground
so that if we do get a little bit of condensation,
it's gonna run back down into the water tank.
If you've got it on top bedside table
and you're getting a bit of a bend in your tube,
you're gonna get condensation building up
in a little bit of a U there.
And it'll pull and create gurgling noises.
And they're the sort of things we can do.
You've also got to remember that conditions change.
So as we go through the seasons,
the level of ambient humidity in the air,
the natural water content in the air changes as well.
So in wintertime when it is cold,
the air is normally really, really dry.
So because it's cold, yeah, can't hold that water content.
So with that dry air, we're gonna get a lot more dryness
in our throat and in our nose and so forth.
We're gonna get you know those sort of symptoms
that I talked about before.
So it's a little bit of a conundrum there
because in wintertime when it's driest, the air is driest
and we need more moisture
that's when we're gonna have those issues
'cause we want to have that humidification
to alleviate the dryness.
So that's where these sort of things come into play.
And that's where you need to learn
how to adjust your tube temperature,
as well as your humidification level.
So change it all out of automatic into manual mode.
Watch some of my tutorials
depending on what machine you've got,
'cause normally I talk about that in the clinical setting.
So if you've got a DreamStation, an AirSense10,
you know, a Fisher & Paykel SleepStyle, whatever it is,
you can change it to manual mode,
and then you'll have more control over your settings.
That's pretty much it today.
I hope you enjoyed my little science lesson.
Humidification it's a blessing and a curse at the same time.
So, but very, very important for a lot of use
so make sure you play around with it
and have a good crack.
But anyway, I'll leave it at that
we're still in stage four lockdowns here in Melbourne.
Our numbers are coming down
but we've still got the curfew in place
and only a few essential businesses open.
And we're only allowed to go out for an hour a day
to get a bit of exercise.
And I might go for a run soon
'cause it's a lovely day outside.
But anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video,
give us a thumbs up and hit the like button if you did.
And also yeah, I'd love it if you subscribe to the channel.
And I love all your comments and feedback,
so if you do have a question, you know,
if you need help with your humidification system,
or you're running into some troubles,
just drop me a comment
and I'll do my best to give you a chop out.
All right, signing out have a great day
and sleep well, cheers.