Need input

[dnrperez]

Ok long story short - on my 4th mask and the DME company started me on a nasal pillow, and the screen capture is from last night. I just don't know what numbers I need to be worried about etc. I know that my AHI is a little higher with the nasal pillow vs my face mask. With the mask I was running about 1.5 vs nasal pillow 2.55 - but I don't know about the other numbers - any insight would be great.

Thanks in advance,
Rich

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/r ... directlink

[robysue]

Rich's data looks like this:



As far as the rise in AHI goes, the 2.55 with the nasal pillows is still plenty low enough to be considered effective treatment, so the question there is really whether the increase from 1.5 to 2.55 has changed how you feel in the daytime. If you are feeling just fine and are more comfortable sleeping with the nasal pillows, then the tradeoff between comfort (and hence better subjective quality of sleep) and slightly higher AHI is worth it.

The leak line looks pretty good for the most part. There's some moderate leaking going on after about 7:30 am until you get up. But since these are total leak figures and the expected leak rate for the FX at 5 cm of pressure is about 20-22 L/min, this leak is not large enough to really affect the quality of your therapy. And so the question is whether that early morning leak was large enough or simply irritating enough to cause you discomfort. If not, then I wouldn't be too concerned about it.

Since your machine is set to run in CPAP mode (constant pressure mode), the machine is NOT recording Flow Limitations or the Vibratory Snores that SH shows. Hence those two indices will always read 0.0 with your current set up. This is NOT a problem with either your machine or the SleepyHead software. It's just the facts:

• Philips engineers have designed the System One machines to only flag Flow Limitations when a machine is running in Auto mode.
• The System One machines actually record two types of Vibratory Snore flags when they are in Auto mode. One type shows up in the Encore Viewer/Pro "Events table", but NOT as flags on the Encore Pro wave form data. The other type shows up in BOTH the Encore Viewer/Pro "Events table" AND the Encore Pro wave form data. This second type of Vibratory Snore is recorded ONLY when the machine is running in Auto mode, and in Auto mode, the machine raises the pressure in response to these Vibratory Snores. The first type is recorded in both CPAP mode and Auto mode. JediMark, the author of SleepyHead, has chosen to only report Vibratory Snores that show up on the wave form. (Notably, in some of the very early versions of SH, both kinds of Vibratory snores were reported AND broken down by type. I don't know why JediMark changed that in later versions of the software.)