Respironics users reading this...your number in parentheses isn't exactly spot on for duration but it is close enough for government work. Respironics machines don't actually give us duration like ResMed machines do but they do give us some markers and they are pretty close. You might see some numbers below 10 and we all know that the events have to last at least 10 seconds to earn a flag. From my past experience (manually counting the seconds on my Respironics low graph) the number in parentheses is reasonably close like within a couple of seconds...if you see an 8 or a 9 then the event probably barely lasted 10 seconds.
I included this image which is Aug 1 again so that I could explain 95% leak numbers again and show how it can sometimes make things look worse than they are. My 95 % leak number for this night was 21.60 with the maximum being 26.40.
If you look at the leak graph line you can see that I actually didn't spend all that much time up around 20 L/min and in fact was much lower for the bulk of the night. Remember the definition of 95/90% numbers....at OR BELOW. The or below part is real important.
Also note the very short lived time across large leak territory (24 L/min for a ResMed machine...Respironics have a different threshold) ...barely went above 24 and I slept right through all this so I just shrug my shoulders and move on. It's not enough to worry about at all and for sure isn't bad enough to negatively impact my therapy. Now if these leaks had woke up me several times during the night then I would attempt to do something about them but only because they disturbed my sleep. Anything that disturbs my sleep is unwanted and that includes the damn dog waking me up at 5 AM this morning AFTER she had peed in the floor. Damn dog. She's old though...so I only cussed a bit.
At any rate while this isn't the prettiest of leak graphs (I have some that are very pretty and I have some that are god awful horrible) it isn't horribly horrible and I slept right through it all so I don't care how pretty it is or isn't.
This is why I don't get all worked up about high 95/90% numbers until I see the actual leak graph. It doesn't take very much higher leak to skew the numbers. BTW this holds true for pressures also.
