Is my doctor accurate?

So recently I had an appt with my sleep doctor. According to my sleep studies I had years ago, most of my apnea was central with some obstructive events. She said that the machine is not good at detecting central events because I said to her that my machine never shows many central events, they are always 95% obstructive. My pressure is currently 14 straight but my AHI events are always horrible. Typically my AHI is 10 or above, and does not often go below 9 or so. I do not feel crappy if I get enough hours of sleep and I do have energy. I trust her and she is a good doctor and well respected, but is there validity to the point that the Airsense 10 cannot accurately detect central apnea events? I do not have access to Oscar or any software unfortunately. Thanks!

Joel

Not commenting on the ability to detect Centrals, but........

If your AHI is 10 and your doctor is unable or unwilling to bring it down to a more reasonable value, you *need* to make access to OSCAR a priority.

You have an AUTOSET, yet it is set on 14 cm single pressure?
Whose fault is that?
Your doctor is not helping much, is he?
Time to hire a new doctor!
Better yet, get Oscar, and find an effective pressure range--YOURSELF!
Then send him his well-earned pink slip.

Well.....ResMed would likely not agree with your doctor.
They tested their FOT for identifying centrals an awful lot and compare what their machine called an apnea event with what an in lab tech would call the events and they came up really close. If I remember right within a fraction of 1 %.

You might want to read up on all the testing that ResMed did to prove that their FOT worked quite well.

And no....I don't have those links handy. Sorry.

You can DL Oscar from the 2nd stickie at the top of the forum... or if not, why can't you?

With an AHI of over 10, and mostly obstructive events, you are in urgent need of a change in your settings, even if you feel OK during the day. Your apnea is producing wear and tear on your body, and this can raise your risks of serious problems down the road.

Did your doctor have no comment at all on the fact that you're having an AHI well over the diagnostic minimum, with mostly obstructive events? The discussion of CAs seems to be beside the point if you're having mostly obstructive events.

We'd be happy to help you get going with Oscar. You'd need a laptop or desktop computer, an SD card in your machine, and a way for your computer to read the card. (If it doesn't have a slot, you can get a cheap plug-in card reader.) If you don't have an SD card, get one 32 GB or less, of the right size to fit in the slot. If you don't have a computer, do you know someone you could borrow one from?

I have an ancient laptop that I totally forgot I had fixed recently. I will see what I can do with Oscar.

joeljjk11 wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 07, 2022 3:22 pm

I have an ancient laptop that I totally forgot I had fixed recently. I will see what I can do with Oscar.

APPLAUSE!

dataq1 wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 09, 2022 9:01 pm

Does your Resmed 10 have an on-screen display of how many central apneas you are experiencing or how are you observing central events?

The AirSense 10 machines, that are full data, will show AHI....and it does show central apnea index/average per hour separately on the machine's LCD screen.
One has to do some of that math that we thought for sure we wouldn't ever need in life to get the breakdown into each category ....but it can be done.

Quite a bit of data can be seen on screen, as long as "essentials" is set to PLUS,
which can be done in the "clinician's menu".

So I was able to access Oscar on my ancient laptop after some struggle lol. Not sure what information is important for people to see as there is a lot of it. Basically I have a lot of apnea events after about two hours of sleep and I would assume this is from supine sleeping. I roll over on my back but I don’t realize it. I also changed my setting two days ago to 14–20 range and last night my AHI was 7.2, the machine detected 0.0 central events. According to my sleep study I have almost no events when I sleep on my left side so this what I tried to do last night and seems to improve my ahi. It is complicated though because I take a sedative medication at night that basically hinders my sleep apnea from being treated or at the minimum makes it difficult. My doctor has said that for me my numbers aren’t that important but really just how I feel. I feel a little better with 14-20 actually than straight 14 and have more energy. I am much more tired in the morning though but I am not really sure why.

Why a sedative at night? Insomnia? There are other ways...

joeljjk11 wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 10, 2022 12:53 pm

So I was able to access Oscar on my ancient laptop after some struggle lol. Not sure what information is important for people to see as there is a lot of it.

That is detailed in the pinned thread at the top of the first page that say "READ THIS BEFORE POSTING* and also here: https://www.cpaptalk.com/wiki/index.php/Oscar:organize