What does this mean?

[sleepyleaf]

I was looking at my charts on encore viewer and saw something that I don't understand... not surprising really.

On the page called "Summary of Daily Events per Hour" at a pressure of 14 I have 360 VS (vibratory snores). Can someone tell me what this means or what could cause it?

On another note, I feel better as far as not being sleepy to drive to and from work but I am still extremely sleepy during the day. I feel that I need to tweak my therapy but have no idea where to begin.

I am on APAP minimum pressure of 8 and maximum pressure fo 15. Sometimes I wake up at the lower pressure almost as if I want more air. Does this make sense?

I just read janknitz blog on how to read my charts and it was very helpful but I still feel like I don't quite understand it all. But... each day I am learning more and more thanks to this great site.

Thanks
Sleepyleaf

[cflame1]

do you have your hose routed somehow that it might be rubbing on something during the night? That's something that can cause a high VS (visible snore) number.

[BleepingBeauty]

I was looking at my charts on encore viewer and saw something that I don't understand... not surprising really.

On the page called "Summary of Daily Events per Hour" at a pressure of 14 I have 360 VS (vibratory snores). Can someone tell me what this means or what could cause it?

On another note, I feel better as far as not being sleepy to drive to and from work but I am still extremely sleepy during the day. I feel that I need to tweak my therapy but have no idea where to begin.

I am on APAP minimum pressure of 8 and maximum pressure fo 15. Sometimes I wake up at the lower pressure almost as if I want more air. Does this make sense?

I just read janknitz blog on how to read my charts and it was very helpful but I still feel like I don't quite understand it all. But... each day I am learning more and more thanks to this great site.

Thanks
Sleepyleaf

What our machines record as "VS" may not be snores at all. It could just be noise generated by the hose moving across the bed. The machine only knows there's "noise" - it can't determine where the noise is coming from. So don't worry about recorded snores if your therapy is otherwise going pretty well.

Many (most?) of us need to tweak our therapy. If 8cms feels like it's not enough air for you, could well be you need to raise the minimum IPAP. The data tells us a lot, so it would be helpful if you could post some of your detailed data reports for other forum members to examine.

[sleepyleaf]

You know... there are times when I can even hear vibrations in the hose. I wonder if my hose buddy would help with that although, I have never had that many VS before. I bought the hose buddy but can't figure out the easy way to get it on the hose yet.

I would post my charts but I can't figure that one out either. I know I have been given instructions but I don't want to download a program on my work computer to do it. If there was a way I could use Hypersnap here at worked to copy the charts and then put them on here I would but haven't figured that one out yet either.

Maybe I will up my minimum pressure to 9 until I can figure out how to post them.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Sleepyleaf

[robysue]

On the page called "Summary of Daily Events per Hour" at a pressure of 14 I have 360 VS (vibratory snores). Can someone tell me what this means or what could cause it?

Those indices in the "Summary of Daily Events per Hour" table are often tricky to properly understand---particularly if the time at pressure is very, very short.

To make this clearer: If you spent less than an hour at 14cm, then the VSI (as well as all the other indices) in the table are extrapolations of the actual data recorded during the time you were at 14cm. To make it clearer how this works, let's suppose you were at 14cm of pressure for a total of 10 minutes during the night. And lets say the machine actually detected a grand total of 60 snores in those 10 minutes---about one VS for every two or three breaths you were taking, perhaps. (Since we take somewhere around 12--16 breaths per minute when we're sleeping, a Vibratory snore for every two or three breahs could easily lead to 60 VS in 10 minutes.) And the number in the box for the (VSI for 14cm) is computed from the 60 snores in ten minutes as follows:

VSI at 14 cm
= (number of Vibratory Snores at 14cm of pressure)/(time in HOURS at 14cm)
= (60 snores)/(10 minutes at 14 cm)
= (60 snores)/(1/6 hour at 14 cm)
= 60*(6/1) snores per HOUR at 14cm
= 360 snores per HOUR at 14cm

And so the number in the box for VSI at 14cm is reported as 360 even though you only had 60 snores during the time you were at 14cm.

So, the meaning of (VSI at 14cm = 360) is that the machine believes that IF you were to continue to snore at the rate you were snoring for a FULL hour at 14cm, then you would have had 360 "Vibratory Snores" in the FULL hour---that's about 6 Vibratory Snores per minute.

Now, I'm working blind here, but I'm willing to bet that you didn't spend much time at 14 cm. That whenever the pressure hit 14cm, it continued right on up to your max CPAP pressure of 15cm. Am I right? If you spent very little time at 14cm and a lot of time at 15cm, the meaning of that incredibly high VSI is most likely: The machine was picking up what it thought was snoring for the full time you were at 14cm and so it just raised the pressure up to 15cm to see if the snoring would get any better.

And as others have said, the "snoring" might not have been snoring at all. Or it could have been. No real way to tell in Encore Viewer. Is the VSI much lower at 15cm? If so, then maybe you were snoring loud enough on each breath at 14cm, but the snoring started to resolve with the addition of one more cm of pressure.

You might get a better idea of whether you were snoring in SleepyHead since it gives you a graph with an index that seems to be related to the severity of the snoring rather than just the frequency of the snoring.

[robysue]

You know... there are times when I can even hear vibrations in the hose. I wonder if my hose buddy would help with that although, I have never had that many VS before. I bought the hose buddy but can't figure out the easy way to get it on the hose yet.

The noses/vibrations you are hearing in the hose are conducted noise.

It could be you're simply hearing the noise of the hose rubbing on something.

Or it could be that you're hearing the sound of your own (very gentle) snoring being amplified by the hose.

What was the OVERALL VSI for the night---not just the one for 14cm?

[sleepyleaf]

robysue you are GOOD!!!! I was only at that pressure for it says 0.2 min then it went up to 14 and then 15. I was read the chart wrong the VS were at 13. Total for the night was around 375 VS.