- Today, I'm gonna show you how to read
and understand your sleep data
on your CPAP machine, and then how to use that data
to optimize your CPAP pressure levels.
The goal is to get our pressure levels as low as possible
while still maintaining good control
of our sleep apnea and snoring
so that we get the best night's sleep possible.
(upbeat music)
Hey guys, my name's Nick and welcome
to my channel "CPAP Reviews".
It's great to be with you.
For those of you tuning in for the first time,
this is my education channel on snoring and sleep apnea.
So, if that's a topic that you're interested in,
please consider subscribing and joining our great community,
and for the regular viewers, hope you're doing well
and thanks for your support.
So, today we're basically gonna be fine-tuning
our therapy pressure levels.
So your pressure levels can either be too high,
where yes, your snoring and sleep apnea will be well managed
and well controlled.
But at the same time, you know the machine's gonna be
a lot noisier, you're gonna get a lot more mask leaks,
you might get a lot more CPAP side effects
like dry eyes, or air in your stomach,
or the pressure's gonna be too low,
and in that scenario it's not gonna be controlling
our sleep apnea and our snoring.
So we're not gonna be waking up feeling,
like we've had a really good night's sleep.
And we wanna get them so that they're just right,
and by that, I mean we want them to be working
at the lowest possible levels
while still controlling our snoring and sleep apnea.
So, we're getting a really healthy night's sleep.
Now, for those of you new to CPAP therapy,
CPAP machines have too menu systems in them.
They have the basic patient menu
which many of you will be already familiar with,
but they also have this hidden away secret menu
that we call the clinical menu.
And it's in the clinical menu where we can change things
like our pressure levels.
So, it's really important to learn how
to access your clinical menu on your CPAP machine
so that you can change those more advanced features
that are really gonna make a big difference
to your CPAP therapy.
Now, if you're unsure on how to do it,
feel free to put a comment in the comments section below
with what machine and model you have,
and that way I can send you a video
on how to change your clinical settings on your machine.
Now, for today's demonstration
I'm gonna be using a BMC Luna G3 machine,
it's got a great big screen which makes viewing your data
very easy but it's also really easy
to change the clinical settings on this machine.
Alright, let's have a look at some of this sleep data.
So, let's scroll across to report.
All machines should have some sort of data on them.
This one's got some great data on them.
And because it wasn't used last night,
all these values are at zero.
So, I'm just gonna scroll across to the 90 day average year,
which is gonna give us 90 days Of average data.
And now we have all the data variables that have popped up
and the main ones we wanna have a look at,
are average pressure, our P95 pressure level
and our apnea hypopnea index or how many apneas hypopnea
we're having on an hourly basis.
So, this is 0.4 at the moment, which is fantastic.
Anything less than five is considered great.
So if you can get that value to less than five
it means that you're getting a nice, healthy sleep.
The average pressure level here,
the average treatment pressure, because this machine
is an automatic machine and it's gonna vary
the pressure minute by minute, throughout the night
depending on how we're breathing.
Basically, the machine's taken all the different
pressures that were provided during the night
and average them out to give us that average pressure.
So it just gives us a guide as to sort of where
the pressure levels are around.
And then we have this value here
which is fantastic called the P95.
And what that tells us is that for 95% of the night
the machine was delivering nine centimeters or below.
So it was only above nine centimeters for 5% of the night.
All right, so I'm just gonna jot those values down
on a piece of paper, but even if you don't have
any of these pressure statistics, as long as you have access
to your apnea hypopnea index, this number down here,
then even with a little bit of trial and error
you can work out and fine-tune your therapy levels.
But I'll talk about that a little bit later.
All right, so now we're gonna go into the settings
to change some of our pressure settings to optimize it.
But before I do, I just wanna show you,
so, if I just click this click real in here
and go to settings, this is the basic menu
that I was talking about.
You can see here, there's no actual pressure settings
but if you go back out again,
and this time I'm gonna hold this button down
and also the button that's just down here, the home button.
If I hold those two buttons down simultaneously
it's gonna open up a different menu,
and that's the clinical menu that I was talking about.
All right, now we have access to all these pressure levels
plus we also have some more comfort features
and some maintenance features up here that we can go to.
But we're looking at the therapy today,
so, this is, you can see here 4 and 20.
So this is the minimum level four, maximum level 20,
fours as low as this machine will go
and 20's as high as it will go.
So this is basically just come out
of the box and hasn't been touched
the pressure levels haven't been optimized.
But what we wanna do is, we wanna fine-tune it.
So, the first value we're going to do is the max auto.
And this is as how high the machine can go.
And we want to set this to our P95 level,
which was 9.5, all right?
The reason we wanna cap this at 9.5 is because
we want to eliminate all those excessively high pressures
that are gonna cause mass leak
and discomfort during the night.
So some of you might say, why not just leave it at 20
and let them let the automatic just automatically
adjust the pressure wherever it needs to go.
And that's fine, but we want to try and aim for comfort
as well as apnea control
and capping your pressure at that P 95 level.
Means that we're still gonna control 95% of our sleep apnea,
but at the same time we're eliminating
all those pressure levels that might be excessively high.
You know, this machine might be going up to 15
at some points during the night, and it's gonna wake us up
and 'cause all these mask leaks and cause all this drama.
Whereas if we can cap it at 9.5, we eliminate all of that
yet still maintain really good control
of our sleep apnea and still have,
a good apnea hypopnea index.
Now, with the min auto, for this example,
we could just leave it at four
because apnea hypopnea index is already so good,
you know, it's less than one.
But if we were really struggling to get apnea hypopnea index
below five we wanna have our min auto level closer
to the average pressure levels.
So, our average was coming at 7.5,
so I want it closer to the average.
I might have it at seven and that's gonna give me
a greater ability to get that apnea hypopnea index
less than five and get a more healthy night's sleep.
But for this example, we can pretty much just keep it
at four because the apnea is already so good.
Now, even if we didn't have any of those pressure statistics
from our sleep report, let's just say
you don't have any of that information.
You can literally just do some trial and error.
So, what I do if I had...
If this machine was on 20 and I had nothing else to go by,
what I do is for the first night, I'd have the max at 10.
All right, I just put it at 10.
And then after one night I'd go to my sleep report
and I'd have a look at what my apnea hypopnea is.
Now, if my apnea hypopnea index is less than five,
The next night I'd bring it down again.
So, I'd go into the clinical settings, go to my max auto
and I'd bring it down to nine, and then I'd run it
for another night.
Have a look again in the morning at what the next value is.
If that value, all of a sudden starts to jump up
to six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and it's going up
then I know that that max auto level is too low.
The pressure needs to be able to go higher
in order to control my sleep apnea.
But even without having access to any or any data,
you can basically just do some trial and error
based on your apnea hypopnea index.
So let's just say that I had it at nine
and then I checked the next morning
and it came in at 15, my apnea hypopnea index.
That's pretty high, it's going up there a bit.
I need to have this a little bit higher,
I might try 12 the next night and see how that goes.
And then, I try 12 and then I look at it the next day.
And all of a sudden the apnea hypopnea index has dropped
from 15 down to seven, I know I'm near where I need to be.
I might bring the min up a little bit
just to give it a little bit more sort of support
at the lower, but you can basically, you know,
just have a play around with these two values
to find what is comfortable for you
but also then use your apnea hypopnea index to guide you
as to whether or not the therapy is effective
in controlling your sleep apnea,
and that's sort of how we do it.
Pretty straightforward (laughs) as I told you,
it's pretty simple.
Now, if you're on a fixed pressure machine,
I'm just gonna change this machine to fixed pressure.
So, a CPAP machine, now where the pressure
is just at one level.
So I'm gonna change this mode from auto CPAP to CPAP.,
and now my treatment pressure is 10.
I'm just gonna put it at 10, same thing again,
do the same thing again.
I'm gonna run the machine for a night on 10 centimeters
and then in the morning, I'm gonna have a look
at my report and I'm gonna to have a look
at my apnea hypopnea index and see what it's like.
And if it's below five, the next night,
I'm gonna get down to nine and it's still below five,
the next night I'm gonna put it at eight
and I can keep bringing that pressure level down
as long as this value, doesn't go above five.
And guys, you can also go on how you're feeling as well.
If you're feeling that you're not getting enough pressure
or you're feeling that you're not getting
that good quality sleep then you might just wanna pump up
that pressure just a little bit to see if it does influence
the way that you feel as well.
Or if you're getting a lot of mask leaks, and you know,
you're struggling with the therapy,
you might wanna bring that pressure level down
just based on how you're feeling,
just to see how you go with it.
Okay, but always report back to this apnea hypopnea index
as your guide to how your therapy is really going in.
All right, guys, so here's the take home from today's video.
Now, if someone is using the therapy and you're doing fine,
you've got no problems then look you probably don't need
to optimize your therapy levels
as long as your apnea hypopnea index is below five.
But if you're someone who's struggling a little bit
maybe you're struggling with mask leaks
or a few of the side effects from a CPAP therapy
or maybe just feeling a little bit flat
and you're not really getting the results that you're after.
Then it really does pay to optimize your pressure settings.
And as long as you have access
to your apnea hypopnea index data,
which you all should have, and can figure out how to get
into that sneaky little secret menu that I showed you,
and change some of those pressure levels.
Then, with a little bit of trial and error
you can really fine-tune
and optimize your CPAP therapy pressure levels
so that they're working at the lowest possible rate
while still maintaining good control
of your snoring and sleep apnea and still giving you
a nice, healthy sleep, and that that's what it's all about.
And if you can get it working at its lowest possible levels
then it's gonna really help improve things like
the noise of the machine,
how well your mask seals on your face.
It's really gonna improve those mask leaks
and the therapy comfort, it's gonna be much easier
to breathe out against the pressure,
you're not gonna get things like dry eyes, and dry mouth,
and sore wind in your stomach, and all those other things.
So, it really will improve your therapy overall.
But certainly don't be afraid
to have a play with your machine.
You can't stuff it up, it's only air pressure.
And if you do stuff it up, then I'm here to help you.
You can just put a comment in there
and we can get you back on track pretty quickly.
But anyway, I'll leave it at that, I hope you're doing well.
Thanks for watching the video and until next time
sleep Well, and look at one another, have a good day, bye.