Quick Check of Oximeters

[sparky2]

I set my pressure down to 8 last night to see if the pulse oximeter would respond with the expected OBD events. My Dr said that anything between 8 and 10 would work for me, but I have noticed my AHI would go up to the high 20s at that setting. I did see two areas of severe low O2 - less than 80%, but I could not correlate them with apneas or hypopneas - my Encore Pro did not show any detailed data! It had compliance data, and some new trend data, but no new nighttime event graphs!

Without this it will be a bit hard to see how the oximeter events line up with the OBD events. This is a real bummer. I do not want to go through another night of high AHI if I can help it. I realize that I probably did it for years before being diagnosed, but I don’t want to subject myself to more harm unnecessarily. I guess I will just stay with trying to slowly bring my numbers down (best so far on my new machine for the last 3 weeks is an AHI of about 7) and keep wearing the oximeter, but I will not really trust it until I can verify it somehow.

This may happen tonight. My nurse friend held his breath while wearing a pulse oximeter today at work and I will have him do the same tonight wearing mine if I run into him.

[sparky2]

I may be the only one still interested, but I finally got the answer! My nurse friend tried holding his breath with a pulse oximeter on his finger at work an his response was - up from 95 to 97, then slowly back down to about 94. He then had to inhale, but the reading had just started to fall rapidly until it reached 90.

I was impressed at how long he could hold his breath when he repeated the experiment with my pulse oximeter. It must have been over a minute and a half. This was nearly the identical response he got where he worked, so I am finally satisfied that the thing works. I guess I just didn't hold my breath long enough.

Now I can get back to the original goal of optimizing my high numbers.


Sparky2