AHIs when awake

General Discussion on any topic relating to CPAP and/or Sleep Apnea.
bandyscot

AHIs when awake

Post by bandyscot » Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:18 am

Are AHIs likely or even possible when you are awake and breathing regularly? My CPAP is recording AHIs even when I am scheduling my breathing.

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Pugsy
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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by Pugsy » Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:23 am

These machines measure air flow rate and it's quite possible for the machine to mistake minor air flow irregularities as some sort of apnea event and flag it.
Awake breathing will often be more irregular than asleep breathing and the machine can't tell if you are awake or not because it just measures air flow.

We have to mentally remove any awake event flags (seen in known awake times) from the overall AHI evaluation because awake stuff doesn't count in therapy evaluation.

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bandyscot

Re: AHIs when awake

Post by bandyscot » Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:31 am

Thank you.
Do known awake times have to be recorded manually?

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Pugsy
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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by Pugsy » Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:47 am

Yeah, pretty much have to manually figure out known awake times...sometimes easy and sometimes not so easy.
Fairly easy to spot at the beginning of the night and you know it usually takes you a little while to go to sleep.

During the night is harder because you would have to evaluate the actual flow rate and that's a lot of work unless you have some sort of record of the wake up time and have an idea of how long you were awake. Doing that involves clock watching and trusting your memory or writing it down and all of those come with some drawbacks. Our memories suck and watching the clock is not advised because it tends to make any staying asleep issues worse.
What I usually suggest is when a person wakes up during the night for whatever reason that they just reach over and turn the machine off and then in a minute or so reach over and turn it back on. This off/on will show up as a break in therapy pressure line and make it easy to spot when it happened on the software graphs. Then a person just eyeballs that time frame to see if events are flagged and if they are pretty good chance they are awake events especially if flagged right back after the machine is turned back on.

It doesn't have to be exact....close is good enough. Don't try to do something that causes you to need to be more alert because that might cause you to not be able to go back to sleep and the primary goal here is "getting good sleep".

I have noticed that on nights where my back pain is worse and I do a lot more tossing and turning and wake up needing to change position because it hurts that my AHI tends to run higher than usual. I suspect some of my events are awake events but I don't worry about exactly when because they aren't horribly numerous and I usually just wake up and roll over and go right back to sleep. My AHI might be 4 to 5 on those nights and other nights below 0.
Since I have a logical explanation for the increase and I know I didn't sleep particularly well with the multiple wake ups I don't do much except shrug my shoulders and move on. Not like I can do much about last night anyway. Water under the bridge. Now if I saw something happening consistently and I couldn't logically explain it away then I would probably do more detective work trying to figure out for sure sleep status and why the flagging.

I saw a guy's report once that his AHI was upper 20s....lots of everything flagged but in very dense clusters and all right around known awake times easily seen on the reports with the breaks in therapy line. I asked him if he spent a lot of time with the mask and machine on and he said yeah...maybe 30 minutes before turning it off in the middle of the night and another 30 to 60 minutes after turning it back on. He was having some serious insomnia issues.
Once those resolved and he made a point to simply turn the machine off and not lay there forever with the machine on his AHI dropped to 2.0.
Pretty much all of his AHI was awake events. Awake/semi awake breathing can be very irregular and we don't notice it....but the machine does or can anyway. We don't realize what is happening though.

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Last edited by Pugsy on Wed Jun 21, 2017 10:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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WickedLoki
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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by WickedLoki » Wed Jun 21, 2017 10:14 pm

[quote='xxyzx']
possible
but very very rare when awake

and you would be aware of them
[/quote]

Your breathing is much more disordered when awake. You have apneas and hypopneas when awake often without even thinking about them.

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by palerider » Wed Jun 21, 2017 11:30 pm

WickedLoki wrote:
ignorance wrote: possible
but very very rare when awake
and you would be aware of them
Your breathing is much more disordered when awake. You have apneas and hypopneas when awake often without even thinking about them.
+1

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by ajack » Thu Jun 22, 2017 4:59 am

+2

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by LSAT » Thu Jun 22, 2017 8:41 am

+3 More BS from XXYZX

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by D.H. » Thu Jun 22, 2017 7:32 pm

It's also possible that you had a few "microsleeps" while you were "awake." This is especially so if you're sleep deprived.

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by Guest » Fri Jun 23, 2017 4:46 am

xxyzx wrote:
bandyscot wrote:Are AHIs likely or even possible when you are awake and breathing regularly? My CPAP is recording AHIs even when I am scheduling my breathing.
===========

yes but very rare

how do you schedule breathing?
it is autonomous unless you are forcing it and you cant do that very long
use your machine (if you have any) while awake - YOU will be astonished.

Guest

Re: AHIs when awake

Post by Guest » Fri Jun 23, 2017 11:16 am

xxyzx wrote: removed the machine and stopped doing it while awake
once again: why are you than talking about things you absolutely have no clue or knowledge about?

.. post some charts of your machine - if you ask nicely you can be set up quite easily. (your problem is likely to be fixed in no time)

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by Guest » Fri Jun 23, 2017 3:36 pm

I believe that YOU can't control your breath while awake (or any thing for that matter)

I on the other side can very well hold my breath, take a deep breath (or some more) whenever I want - or just breath very shallow. ... but I'm not the one who has seriuos problems with the blood oxygen (you really might want to get that checked)

... but that was not the point of the discussion or the question of the OP! It was regarding scored events.
If you would have enough oxygen in your blood, the brain damage beeing not too much progressed and would not be deprived of sleep you would make the conclusion from your former statement to the point, that while awake - fully aware - you don't breath even - you just breath as necessary.
thus resulting in events beeing scored.

really get yourself a machine - even a plain CPAP would help you at least a little to the point where you can reach some basic understanding and get the help you need. you are in no healthy condition.

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by palerider » Fri Jun 23, 2017 7:39 pm

Guest wrote:
xxyzx wrote:
bandyscot wrote:Are AHIs likely or even possible when you are awake and breathing regularly? My CPAP is recording AHIs even when I am scheduling my breathing.
===========

yes but very rare

how do you schedule breathing?
it is autonomous unless you are forcing it and you cant do that very long
use your machine (if you have any) while awake - YOU will be astonished.
"astonishment" requires the ability to think... and xxyzx has shown no evidence of that.

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stupid troll -.-

Re: AHIs when awake

Post by stupid troll -.- » Sat Jun 24, 2017 5:57 am

xxyzx wrote:
you can try
but you cant hold your breath indefinitely
and you cant time your breathing indefinitely
either you will hyperventilate and the body will stop you
or the body will take over when you hypoventilate

the OP said SCHEDULE the breathing
I note that you cant really do that at all
and not long enough to be significant
that is by far the biggest bullshit you have ever posted on this board.

It was you who said that you use that awesome speech-to-text app that gets everything wrong, wasn't it?
How do you do that if YOU cannot control your breathing? (rest assured - we all are very much convinced that with you no higher brain-functions are involved in the process - or even needed for that matter)

Honestly! see a doctor - any doctor! even a GP will help you! take a pencil and some paper with you, if you are unable to speak.
seek professional help - your problems are way beyond the scope of any self-help group or a layman approach.

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Re: AHIs when awake

Post by kiri » Sat Jun 24, 2017 7:34 am

Sometimes I seem to stop breathing or shallow breathe when I'm awake. Usually when I'm tired.

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