Sleepy Head Screenshots - Please interpret

[tbinbny]

Here are two nights of sleepy head data. Night 1 slept very well, as you can probably tell the stats are a lot better on night 1 vs night 2. Are the stats acceptable though? Should I make any changes to my machine? Also, what do all of the graphs mean? I understand some of this, and I have looked through a lot of the manuals and posts, but I was just looking for a quick look from someone else as there seem to be so many experts out there! Let me know. Thank you!

Night 1 Screenshot 1


Night 1 Screenshot 2


Night 1 Screenshot 3


Night 2 Screenshot 1


Night 2 Screenshot 2


Night 2 Screenshot 3

[Pugsy]

The extra graphs...resp rate, tidal volume, minute vent and those on down...the norms for all those values vary widely and unless you have some serious lung issues they will fall within a normal range for you. You can google each one to find the normal ranges but they vary between male, female, short or tall, even where we live as in altitude.
I don't really bother with those graphs because if I had some sort of lung issues then I probably would already know about it.

Main graphs I look at are the events graph, the flow rate graph, pressure graph when using auto adjusting pressures, leak graph and snore graph when snores are numerous..

I think if this were my report I might think about maybe 0.5 cm more pressure mainly for the snores which are indications of flow reductions that are minor...and the increase hyponeas may be a few more of the snores growing up to be hyponeas.
I would be using APAP mode so that I could have FL data available.

You appear to be using cpap mode...in cpap mode Flow Limitation scoring is turned off.
If you want to mimic cpap mode and have FL data available to you then you can just switch to APAP mode but set minimum pressure to equal maximum pressure..so in this case minimum 8 and maximum of 8...or set to APAP mode with tight range 8.0 minimum and 8.5 or 9.0 maximum.
If you were in APAP mode the machine would most likely increase the pressure trying to reduce those snores and probably some FLs that are occurring that we aren't seeing in cpap mode.
Flow limitations and snores are warning signs of an impending collapse of the airway and in APAP mode the machine will try to prevent further collapse with a little more pressure.

Leak line graphs are well within acceptable limits. Large leak is somewhere up around total leak of 80 to 90 L/min for your machine.
That would be the top line in the leak graph.

[tbinbny]

Thanks again Pugsy! I am going to set it to auto right away! Do you think I should just go with a range of like 8-9 or should I go 8-12 or something? I mean would it hurt to do that? If it is truly auto sensing, should I give it a larger range and let it do its thing? Or shall I just stick close to the prescribed level til I follow up with the doc in a few weeks?

[Pugsy]

Actually unless I see a real pressing need for an auto range of pressures I would suggest that a newbie use a small range to start with. Mainly because when we are so new to this therapy sometimes the least little thing just adds more sleep disruptions into the mix. Sometimes the machine goes chasing those snores to the point of being annoying.

APAP mode and pressure variations associated with it can sometimes disturb sleep...and we don't want anything to disturb our sleep because it is already pretty fragile and especially when just starting out on this therapy.
Some people find that even very minor pressure changes cause awakenings.

Now me....I use a wide open range because I have discovered with some experimentation that I sometimes need a lot more pressure and I can sleep through changes from my 10 minimum (when I was using APAP) and my max was 20 cm and I would on occasion get real close to that maximum.
But even I started out with a tight range till I figured out where I needed to go. See this old thread of mine to get an idea what and why I did what I did.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=42302&p=372692#p372692

So actually for a newbie I would suggest a rather tight range to start with just to get the feel of where the pressure is wanting to go and see if pressure changes were maybe a disruptive factor to sleep in general. Your 8 cm pressure is real close to probably being an ideal pressure anyway.
I would suggest a tight range like 8 to 10 to start with. If you happen to have some clusters of hyponeas at the 10 maximum then we could maybe open it up a little to see where it wants to go. If your snores are still numerous with 8 to 10 range..maybe a little more minimum pressure to do a better job of holding the airway open and preventing the collapse rather than trying to play catch up after the fact.

[tbinbny]

OK, I'm going to try the 8-10 and see how that goes. Thanks again!