My first PulseOx 7500 results!

It's taking months to get results/treatment from Kaiser for my suspected OSA, so I'm buying toys and trying to figure out what's going on ahead of time. I bought an SPO PulseOx 7500 pulse oximeter and wore it last night for the first time.

It's a little difficult to tell exactly what's going on, because I put it on about an hour before I went to bed, and it took about an hour to fall asleep, so all the percentages and indices are biased low.

What sticks out is that I have a baseline SpO2% of 96.25%, but out of the several hours I was alseep I spent:
43.8 mins in the 93-88% range (with 79 desats)
1.7 mins in the 87-80% range (with 17 desats)

For a total of 96 desats in several hours of sleep. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Should I expect a desat for every apnea/hypopnea event?

I'm also not sure why they cut the numbers like that in the first report, because a lot of literature look for drops below 90%. I had 32 events where I dropped below 90%, with the worst event being 48 seconds at 85%. It looks like I spent about 19 mins under 90% out of several hours.

If they hook you up to oxygen when you fall below 90% in the hospital, it doesn't seem good that I spent roughly 19 mins that way last night. But to be honest, that's not anywhere near as bad as I feared.

Anyone know if there's a way to export the report? I don't have a printer and I use a webmail service, so I can't print it or e-mail it.

pdfcreator from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... p_id=57796 will install a virtual printer on your computer that you can use for creating pdf files of anything. You can the post them, mail them, do whatever you want with them.

O.

96 desats does not sound good to me. I think you need to discuss the cause with your doc. You do not get a desat with every apnea. Here is a recent report off my SPO7500. My OA was 0.4, my HI was 0.2 for an AHI of 0.6. It shows no desats.





I did not take the time to line up the two reports but if you do you can see the O2 levels during a apnea.

Jerry

Thanks for the input! I'm trying to muster evidence that will help me kick Kaiser Permanente into faster action.

Symptom-wise, I feel like I have pretty severe OSA. So I just can't imagine dealing with this for several more weeks while I wait for results, get a second study, and then wait for results again, then wait for an APAP.

The above results from last night were actually one of my better nights (slept longer and felt better than usual when I awoke), so I'm going to record again tonight and then try again to get someone at Kaiser to treat me faster.

If you had a data capable machine and the software and reader you could better take care of your own treatment, for me that would be more important than a pulse ox. Jim

Still waiting for my health care provider to get back to me with results/diagnosis/prescription/treatment. But not waiting patiently. I purchased a used M-Series APAP that will hopefully be here next week.

I've done a few nights of pulse oximetry on myself now and the pattern is holding true. I have single-spike desaturations where I snore for 10-30', getting louder and louder, then I desat and roll to a new position.

But I also have periods of serious repeated desaturations. I really wish I had a way to see if those patches of bad desaturation were REM sleep or not. Those regions look like distinct sleep stages at regular intervals. I may try zooming my night cam in on my pillow and hope to catch myself facing the camera during one of these desat periods. Maybe I'll be able to tell if those heavy desat periods are stage 3/4 or REM by watching my eyes.

This graph from last night is 146 desats of 3% or greater. A couple of the desats went down to 84.3%. I had multiple desats of 60-90 seconds in the 86-84.3% O2 range.

Oh, a side note. That very first desat peak was when I was still awake. I held my breath as long as I comfortably could to see what numbers it would cause. I probably fell asleep about 30 mins after that.