New CPAP user - looking for some perspective on sleep study

[audihere]

I'm a new CPAP user and it's working great, I feel much better. Diagnosed with "mild" sleep apnea from a take home sleep study. These were the results I was given...

AHI 9.2
Total Apneas 1
Total Hypopneas 54

Oxygen Desaturation
ODI 13.1
Total 102

Oxygen Saturation %
Baseline 95
Avg 91
Lowest 71

Oxygen Sat <+88% is 36 minutes out of 7.75hr

Pulse
Min 40
Avg 64
Max 188

The oxygen and pulse data looks bad to me, but I didn't get a good explanation about it from any of the doctors. I have nothing to compare this too and would like to put it into perspective.

Thanks!

[LSAT]

Basically you stopped breathing 9.2 times an hour and your O2 level dropped to 71% sometime during sleep. You have mild Sleep Apnea and will need treatment with CPAP.

[jnk...]

. . . take home sleep study. . . . Oxygen Sat <+88% is 36 minutes out of 7.75hr . . . Pulse Min 40 Avg 64 Max 188 . . . The oxygen and pulse data looks bad to me, but I didn't get a good explanation about it from any of the doctors. I have nothing to compare this too and would like to put it into perspective.

I am not a doctor. More important, I'm not YOUR doctor. But I will give you my take, anyway, because I'm presumptuous like that.

The idea of a home sleep study is to qualify you for getting insurance to pay for PAP treatment; so, in that sense, the worse the numbers look, the better for you.

For an OSA patient not using PAP at the time of the study, your saturation is significant, but not as bad as many. The average pulse is within normal range, and the significance of the minimum/maximum is unknown without seeing how often and under what circumstances those highs and lows were hit. You may, for example, have simply had one or two random double beats while in the 90s that got recorded as 180s, but that can be dismissed unless, for some odd reason, your particular medical history is exceptional in a way that makes it interesting info to a doc.

Bottom line, as LSAT said, is that the test proved that you will likely benefit from PAP therapy if that therapy is optimized for you. And that, my friend, is a successful home sleep study!

I wish you the best with your therapy, even if you do drive an Audi.

Feel free to ask more questions. We may not always know the answers, but most of us enjoy the clickity-click sound of our typing out answers to you anyway.

-jeff

[Pugsy]

I agree with what jnk and LSAT said.

Mild refers to the number of events per hour on an average per house based on total reporting time....no way to take into account how long those events happened or if you had a truckload of them within 15 minutes and nothing for maybe an hour or 2...
which both could account for the low oxygen and increased pulse rate
So while the 8 per hour doesn't initially look all that exciting...maybe they were massive long in duration or maybe you had a bunch in a cluster that created the low O2 situation.

So "mild" may not be all that mild in terms of clinical significance relating to the stress your body is undergoing.

[audihere]

Thank you all for the assessments of my test results. I feel 1000% better with the new CPAP machine.