The leak numbers shown on the MyAir app are what we call 95% numbers and they may or may not mean that you are having prolonged periods of high leak.
95% numbers by definition mean "AT or BELOW" that number shown. It is not where we spent the biggest part of the night and it is not the overall average.
See this thread for an example of why a high 95% number doesn't mean the end of the world in terms of leak management.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=108724&p=1036669&hi ... t#p1036669
Here's the problem with having a low AHI and a high leak number. We don't know if the numbers are low because nothing happened or because the leaks were so bad that the machine just simply didn't know that the apnea events were happening.
From my own personal experience with a ResMed machine...once I hit 40 L/min the machine started having trouble sensing stuff. I got a lot of UA flagged events which means something happened but the machine couldn't figure it out as to what to call it.
Relatively short periods of time deep into large leak territory probably wouldn't affect the AHI all that much even if a handful of apnea events were missed but prolonged periods of time could impact the therapy effectiveness significantly. Only the time in big leak becomes questionable.
30 minutes out of 8 hours...I wouldn't worry about....4 hours out of that 8 hours deep into large leak territory I would worry about.
So how deep into large leak territory (above 24 l/min for ResMed) and how long one stays there is what I look at for leak evaluation.
For evaluation you really have to use the software and look at the graphs.
Now if a person wanted to use the 95% number as a guideline to help them decide when to use the software....I would for sure start looking when the 95% number was 35 or higher. Might not mean much of a problem but that's where I start looking at doing some real evaluation.
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