Post
by cnaumann » Sat Jan 03, 2015 5:06 pm
Now that you have the graphs and information about right, it would be helpful if you would zoom in and show some of the deaths of the individual breaths during the CA and Hypopnea events. This will give an idea of how long they are lasting.
The heavy black line above the flow rate chart shows where the machine's 'back up rate' kicked in. Those are individual ticks, but they are happening so often that they look like a continuous line. Basically, this is where the machine determined that you stopped breathing too long and initiated a breath of for you. 'Too long' can either be determined by the machine's algorithms based on your breathing pattern (auto mode) or can be manual set. There is nothing really wrong with having long times periods of machine-initiated breaths. It just means the machine is doing its job.
The flow rate shows the flow in and out of you lungs. When the line goes up, you are breathing in, when it goes down, you are breathing out. Air is always flowing in the hose leading up to your mask. There are vent holes in your mask that make sure the air in the hose is always fresh. The machine removes this constant flow (total leak rate) from the flow rate graph to show only the air moving in and out of your lungs. Your ASV machine attempts to keep the peak of this flow rate constant, and will increase inspiration pressure if a breath is shallower than average and decrease pressure if a breath is deeper than average. This helps to even out you breathing, but it assumes your 'average' provides acceptable ventilation.
You can look up normal ranges for all the breathing statistics.
As far as what is 'acceptable' in those charts, it varies a lot person to person. It boils down to a few parameters, none of which are directly measured by you machine. Those parameters are basically you blood O2 and CO2 levels and if you are getting enough restful sleep.
Your spO2 levels need to stay above 88%. Even breathing helps ensure that you spO2 levels stay in acceptable levels. Apneas lasting longer than 10 seconds can cause dips in your spO2 levels, that is one reason to treat sleep apnea. While your machine can measure apneas, it cannot measure spO2 levels.
The other reason to treat apnea is that they can disturb sleep. This is especially true of obstructive apneas where you need to wake up slightly to increase muscle tone in you throat to clear your airway. Central apneas and hypopneas can resolve themselves with you having to wake up. They are more difficult to treat (there is a lot of trial and error in the whole sleep apnea business, in case you have not noticed) but _may_ not be as harmful.
So check your spO2 levels, and worry more about how you are feeling than what those graphs look like.
