need help understanding sleep cycle graph on silverlining

I am not sure what to make of the lines that look like they were made by an etch a scetch in the silverlining software. I looked at mine at the sleep center, but there they had rem and stages of sleep listed. I will try a search here also.

Sleep cycles or sleep stages are not shown on any autopap's software graph. Autopap machines are not capable of collecting sleep cycle data.

You have to be hooked up to other recording devices as you were in the sleep lab's PSG sleep study -- hooked to an EEG, and to electrodes noting rapid eye movement, etc., in order to get data about your sleep cycles or stages of sleep.

Neither an autopap nor its software gives you that kind of information.

So what are the hills and valleys graph under the hypops and apnea blips.

Anonymous wrote:So what are the hills and valleys graph under the hypops and apnea blips.

Respiratory cycles a.k.a. "breaths", dude!

They are graphed for your viewing pleasure as "flow limited", "intermediate" or "normal".

The cycle states doesn't have a scale on it. Any idea what it is actually telling us? I don't know if mine is typical, but with whatever the scale is my cycles states is at the top end of the scale in the first half of an hour then it sharply drops to the bottom of the scale duing the second half hour. Does this mean that I had less breaths or respiratory cycles then? Any idea what the scaling is? My cycle states line is very erratic swing from the top of the scale to bottom sharply all over the place over a given night.

You'll find the relevant info on page 33 (or 38) of the manual - press the small black question mark on the SL3 screen, and choose the 420E.

For some reason I can't copy and paste it for you.

O.

Don't you wish someone could reverse-engineer the SL3 data files and write some better software to work with?

SL3 lets you do an ASCII dump, but it is only the summary data, not the details .

I'd take a stab at it, but the resulting software would only run under an obscure real-time Unix-like OS which wouldn't be much use to all y'all running MS products like XP .

SL3 lets you do an ASCII dump, but it is only the summary data, not the details

Well, ya can't say I didn't warn ya.....


O.

ozij wrote:Well, ya can't say I didn't warn ya.....

Anything said to me prior to beginning treatment is likely to have been forgotten!

Thanks for the info. Not sure if I have a different help file than you, but page 30 on mine is talking about machine setup. I did a search for the terms "Cycle states" but came up empty.

Then I did locate a "cycle status" section -

"The analysis of the flow form during the inspiration computed at each respiratory cycle allows their classification in the Normal (N), Intermediate (I) or at Flow Limitation (FL). On the trend trace, the higher the trace, the closer the inspiratory cycles are to normal (N). Conversely, a low trace indicates a trend of Flow Limitation (FL). A median trace indicates a trend of intermediate cycles (I)."

Is this similar to what you were seeing?

If that's how its laid out, it seems there isn't a scale that they are really indicating other the up is good, down is limited, and the middle is in between.

What's interesting on my chart, although I'm making an assumption that an apnea is more likely to be present during a flow limited cycle, is that during the low points or flow limited cycles that I don't show any apneas. The apneas that I have recorded seem to occur mostly when my cycle state is towards the normal trend although some have occurred in the intermediate cycle. I would have though the apneas would be more likely during the FL trend.

The two other interesting things I see are that when my cycles are at the FL trend that my leaks are at their peak and my pressure is at its lowest.

Is this similar to what you were seeing?

Yes, that's what I meant.

O.