Heart rate jumps during sleep w/o waking/activity

IS your minute vent in a reasonable range?
The higher AHI, although deemed to be below the treated/untreated threshold of 5.0, is still somewhat high. Some of us can tolerate that rate, especially compared to what it was before, but some of us cannot. We need less than 3.0, and will do much better even lower. So, your events table in OSCAR should indicate not only hypopnea events, as well as the odd central and/or obstructive event, but also the duration of each of them. The obstruction is innocuous if it's less than 10 seconds long. When they get beyond 15 seconds, that can mean holding one's breath that long, and doing it several times each hour, all night long. That puts a strain on the heart that should also be slumbering along at about 50 BPM or less and getting its own brand of 'sleep.'

Dreams also cause an elevated HR, and they can go on for several minutes...not a whole afternoon like we 'experience' in our dreams.

The only other issue might be temporary electrolyte deficits of one kind or another. Or too much. Potassium, calcium, and magnesium are the Big Three. Blood tests might reveal if this is the case.

Can your fitness tracker upload minute-by-minute, or hour-by-hour data to an app or to a desktop?

Does it take an ECG? There might be an arrhythmia cropping up intermittently, or what we call 'paroxysmally' in the cardiac field.

Thanks for your reply.

>> "IS your minute vent in a reasonable range?"
I don't understand how I can see this from the Resmed 10 data? Please explain.

>> Can your fitness tracker upload minute-by-minute, or hour-by-hour data to an app or to a desktop?
Not that I have discovered, but will do more checking.

>> Does it take an ECG?
No, but I sure wish it did.

Having done a bit more research, it appears to be sporadic, but has also been occurring off/on only in the last few weeks. During that time, my PCP and I have tried to lower one of my BP meds (Spironolactone) due to my BP getting a bit low, but I since backed out the change. Also about the time, I fell backwards on concrete, smacked my head, but had no symptoms other than a mild headache.

The big problem with my sleep is that I have zero deep sleep and have significant brain fog. I have a lot of body pain hips, back, shoulders, ribs due to arthritis and due to low platelets post-chemo. I take NSAIDs sparingly.

The more I do stuff - even light duty things - the pain ratchets up and the AHIs go up as does movement, I do use a soft cervical collar at night. My PCP also gave me some gabapentin to try, but I've not made a serious attempt at using it yet with so many moving parts it's impossible to figure out what works and what doesn't.

I've stopped my evening Mg supplement to see it that's beneficial or detrimental - that could be why the AHIs have bumped up the last 5 days. Previous 5 days were under 2.5 and two were under 2, so I'm restarting the Mg.

I need discipline myself to change only one thing at a time and keep better change records so I can isolate the effect of changes better.

I believe you mentioned in your OP that you use OSCAR. OSCAR shows the minute vent in the data in the left column, left of all the graphs.

Yup, I found it... thanks.

Here are mine for the last week:
MV Date Min Med 95% 99.5%
11/10 0.88 6.13 9.00 13.13
11/09 0.88 6.25 9.13 14.50
11/08 1.00 5.88 8.38 14.00
11/07 1.38 6.13 9.25 14.38
11/06 0.88 5.88 9.00 13.63
11/05 1.00 5.75 9.00 13.75
11/04 2.00 6.13 8.63 13.25

From what online information I could find, that approx. 6 for a median looks "reasonable", the 99.5% seems to indicate sleep apnea?

Some of those look low to me. Are you showing hypopneas? Even restrictions of flow that don't actually awaken you, at least as you remember them, DO cause arousals. Each arousal disrupts the series of sleep stages one takes, meaning you might start all over again. The typical person experiences REM, for example, approximately three (3) times during the first six hours of sleep. Six hours is pretty stingy all by itself, but a single arousal during those six hours might lose you one of the three typical REM cycles. That's a chunk...again...if sleep longer than six hours is fleeting for you. It is for me...I often get less than six, but my low AHI and solid treatment with my fixed pressure of 8.0 means I never fail to get the three stages completed. As a result, I function well, and never have to nap. Nor do I tend to lose focus, drift off, nod off, etc.

I wonder if you sometimes awaken on your back.

I haven't replied lately because I'm seeing a lot of inconsistencies in the CPAP data/results.

First, I'm pretty much required to sleep on my back because sleeping on my sides causes a lot of pain in back, hips, shoulders and ribs. So I use a soft cervical collar to minimize chin-tucking and a relatively high pressure to handle the events.

I'm actually seeing much higher events and AHIs when I sleep on my sides, which I do when the back pain gets too harsh - generally about 5-6 hours into a sleep.

I'm tempted to try a double sleep strategy - 5-6 hours at overnight and an afternoon nap of 1-2 hours simply to bypass the issue with back pain

I do see a small, variable number of hyponeas and a higher number of CAs which seem to have a correlation with movement/sleeping on the side.

The original problem of much higher pulse rates appears to have gone away.

I occasionally see a pattern where there appears to be a sleep cycle minus the deep sleep, but those are nights where the pain is relatively low. Seems the more I move, the worse the pain and the effects on sleep.

Right now, I'm working toward getting some consistency in the sleep data - last week was a low of 1.87 and a high of 6.96 - including a night where one 6 hr period was 1.41 (mostly on back) and the rest of the night was 16.9 (mostly on side).