Curious on events

[mharrison]

Ok, so my tech at my sleep study had told me that even on CPAP I'll still have events but the machine will detect it and adjust pressure to stop it...I know I may be oversimplifying but that was the gist of it.

Anyway, in looking at my SH data over the course of the last few days, I notice that when I have events, the majority seem to occur in a small time frame.
For example, last night I went to bed around 11:30 and around 11:50 I had at least 8-12 events all clustered together. Majority seem to be clear airway.
Since I know that when I am falling asleep I tend to take pauses in between breaths, could this be triggering the events in such a cluster? It looks like once I'm asleep I had 7 events the rest of the night from midnight until 6:30 when I woke up. Am I somewhat justified in thinking that the CA events could be false positives due to how I fall asleep?

[LSAT]

When you are restless and trying to fall asleep and when you are partially awake in the AM, it's not uncommon to have CAs. These are events where you stop breathing for 10+ seconds, but no blockage is noted. Pugsy calls this sleep/awake junk.

[Pugsy]

They could be false positives from tossing and turning while falling asleep or they could be the real deal clear airway/centrals that can happen when we are transitioning to sleep. They are called sleep onset centrals..normal and not usually a problem unless you have a truck load of them that keep bouncing you out of sleep so that you can't ever really get to the other sleep cycles.

Either way...real or false positives or Sleep/Wake/Junk....you aren't having enough centrals to be a problem worth worrying about and the machine doesn't do anything with centrals anyway other than tell you that you had some whether real or not.
You would need a very special machine for the treatment of centrals.

Now for the OAs and hyponeas...the machine will try to prevent those with pressure increases but it takes more than one isolated event (again real or false positive SWJ) for the machine to do what it does with pressure changes. There's a complicated algorithm involved for the machine to decide what to do about the obstructive stuff it senses might be going on. There are snores and flow limitations that also affect how the machine responds to obstructive in nature apnea events. Snores and Flow Limitations aren't part of the AHI but they do play a big part in how the machine goes about doing its job.

If you are pretty sure those tiny clusters are awake/semi awake stuff getting flagged by mistake...just ignore and move on.
I never really worry about anything that gets flagged within 30 minutes of any known awake time because I never know if it's real or not and unless there happens to be a large dense cluster going on consistently....I don't put that time frame under the microscope all that much.

If it really bugs you and you want to do the work you can probably zoom in on that time frame and get a fairly decent idea if you were awake or asleep by looking at the flow rate graphs. But it takes lots of work learning to recognize the subtle changes in breathing patterns for some people. Sometimes awake breathing is really easy to spot but sometimes it isn't so easy.
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[mharrison]

Thanks for the good info. I think I'm just going to write them off as junk and move on. Like I said, I know that was around the time I shut the TV off and rolled over so I was either starting to fall asleep or had just fallen asleep. Even with the cluster, AHI was 2.3 so I'm not overly concerned, just trying to learn as much as I can since this is my life for the foreseeable future...want to make sure I don't get complacent and not know when the status quo changes.