My SpO2 was reported as a low of 52% during my sleep study.

My sleep doctor said ten days ago that he wondered why I had not been diagnosed earlier. My reply "my wife diagnosed this much earlier..." I was apathetic...

Is it possible to actually have a blood oxygen concentration of 52% and still be alive?
Realize the lab recorded this before Julie woke me up at 1am saying "now we'll see how you sleep with the CPAP". My wife said later that morning that the lab could not take the liability of me dieing on premises and that's why Julie put me on CPAP after only three hours.

That low of a reading will cause most if not all sleep labs to come running in to mask you up and do a titration.
You can be confident that your low reading was just before they woke you up with the mask in hand.

Many of us record incidents of very low 02 during testing, but they're very short-lived and you've likely been having them for years, so take it as part of the whole experience and not as something highly unusual happening only to you. And luckily you were at the lab this time .

PlinkerCraig wrote:My sleep doctor said ten days ago that he wondered why I had not been diagnosed earlier. My reply "my wife diagnosed this much earlier..." I was apathetic...

Is it possible to actually have a blood oxygen concentration of 52% and still be alive?
Realize the lab recorded this before Julie woke me up at 1am saying "now we'll see how you sleep with the CPAP". My wife said later that morning that the lab could not take the liability of me dieing on premises and that's why Julie put me on CPAP after only three hours.

I've heard numbers this low before, and never really thought much about it.

I wonder if pulseoxen are actually accurate in that range? However, even if it's not that accurate, I suspect if it reads 52%, things are really bad.

Pulseoxen do often have false readings, but they're usually pretty obvious if you look at the graphs. I've seen min drop from 95% to 10% or so, and then back up to 90% all within 10 seconds or so. Real O2 desats have characteristic shape and are much slower than that. I hope newer pulseoxen are more careful about false readings. My CMS50D+ will flag the data as "inaccurate" somehow, but I forget the details about what it calls it. I know the program displays it as gray instead of red or green.

I wonder what the "serious harm," "brain damage" and "drop dead" levels are for SpO2? I would assume that duration matters as well as instantaneous values. They seem to get worried when it drops below 90%, but lots of people have much lower numbers reported during sleep tests. I would expect the low O2 for apnea is for short bursts.

PlinkerCraig wrote:My sleep doctor said ten days ago that he wondered why I had not been diagnosed earlier. My reply "my wife diagnosed this much earlier..." I was apathetic...

Is it possible to actually have a blood oxygen concentration of 52% and still be alive?
Realize the lab recorded this before Julie woke me up at 1am saying "now we'll see how you sleep with the CPAP". My wife said later that morning that the lab could not take the liability of me dieing on premises and that's why Julie put me on CPAP after only three hours.

Hi Craig,

I'm a newb and just had my sleep study done at Tuality FG hospital. Is that where you went? The sleep technician woke me up and said "I had to replace the oximeter because your levels were really scary!". She said they improved afterwards. I just got my report and it said my oxygen mean was below normal @ 90% and it dropped to 82%. There were a couple areas in the report where my pulse was as high as 175bpm & 220bpm. The thermometer that goes in your nose was faulty too, she had to change that out before I fell asleep and said it was the 1st one that's ever been bad, but I'm questioning the oximeter readings.

I figured 52% would be the oxygen saturation of a dead man but it could have been faulty equipment. I had asthma for a short time in my teens and on the day I was diagnosed, I could barely breathe and my oxygen was at 81-84% and they told me if it dropped below 80% they would have to call an ambulance to transport me to the hospital.

Brian,
I went to a lab near Providence call Somnique, and they specialize in sleep disorders. Maybe I can get them to show me the graphs when I visit for a follow up in a few weeks. It would be interesting to see if the low number was some brief spike or what shape it really was over time.
-Craig

Mine bottomed out at 56%.

When i ended up in ER, long after I got my cpap, every time I dozed off (while sitting up) I would wake up and watch my SPO2 number climbing from the mid 70's. I tried very, very hard not to doze off. And that was just drifting, not deep sleep.