My home sleep study results. Comments welcomed

Hello,

Attached are the results from my home sleep study from ~2 months ago. Since that time I have gone from 207 lbs to 180. I recently started therapy two weeks ago. I am using a Resmet Airsense Autoset 10 with a full face mas. Pressure range is 4-18. I am curious to know what you think about my test results. I think I am sleeping better.

Thanks in advance,

Steve

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honeybadger wrote:I have gone from 207 lbs to 180

honeybadger wrote:Hello,

Attached are the results from my home sleep study from ~2 months ago. Since that time I have gone from 207 lbs to 180. I recently started therapy two weeks ago. I am using a Resmet Airsense Autoset 10 with a full face mas. Pressure range is 4-18. I am curious to know what you think about my test results. I think I am sleeping better.

Thanks in advance,

Steve

http://s1264.photobucket.com/user/nevet ... %20Uploads

I think you should download Sleepyhead software so you can see what your average pressure is and what your nightly AHI is. The lower pressure of 4 may need to be increased......your daily reports will tell you that.

i have downloaded Sleepyhead, but dont really understand the results

I am curious if you all believe that the diagnosis and prescription are correct based on the results I posted.

Thanks!

AHI of 12 per the home sleep study meets diagnosis criteria for mild sleep OSA.
The prescribed settings are pretty typical of what someone will be given when a home study is used for diagnosis and an apap machine is given in lieu of an in lab titration sleep study where they monitor the pressure directly.
Severity of diagnosis has no bearing at all on pressures that end up being needed. The settings of 4 to 18 are just a starting point. They will likely work fine as long as you don't need more than 10 cm to keep your airway open but won't work so good if you need pressures in the teens to hold the airway open because that 4 cm starting point may take too long for the machine to get to where it needs to be.

You need to learn to evaluate the software reports to make sure that the minimum pressure is a good starting point. It's not all that difficult to understand what you are seeing on the SleepyHead reports. Just concentrate on the basics...AHI and event category breakdown and pressure and understand how leaks might impact the therapy. All that other stuff that SleepyHead shows you really isn't all that critical to understand.

Thank you so very much. I will definitely look closer at sleepyhead and then come back and post

Pugsy, is it correct of me then to say that if I am having any "events" when on the machine, its an indication that the pressure starting point is too low? Hence the event is allowed to happen?

It's an unrealistic expectation to expect the machine to totally eradicate all apnea events.
Remember a handful is considered normal anyway. You gotta be having more than 5 per hour to even earn the diagnosis.
Plus these machines will sometimes flag awake/semi awake breathing irregularities by mistake because they just measure airflow and have no way to know for sure if you are awake or asleep.
While it is nice to see a reported AHI of 0.0 so we can pat ourselves on the back...it isn't something that we necessarily strive for. Sometimes trying to totally eradicate all events is worse than letting a few happen.

I remember from years a go a newbie was just starting therapy and was having an AHI of a little over 2.0 which is quite acceptable and she kept increasing her pressure in hopes of killing every darn one of those events and she never could but she gave herself a bad case of aerophagia (air in the stomach and intestines) while trying. Made herself sick searching for that elusive 0.0.

Those nice low AHI numbers don't guarantee that you will feel the "miracle" anyway.
CPAP therapy is one of those things were it's acceptable to have a few "events" slip past the defenses as long as we are sleeping well and feeling decent.

Thank you so much. The machine is reporting that I am having 2-6 events per night. I'm assuming that number is no longer 12 due to the machine being able to prevent them. I'll definitely get my data into sleepyhead. Resmed has a web-based feedback system that i access, but its fairly basic info thats being provided (# of events, leak, hours used)

AHI is the average per hour....so that 12 AHI means 60 over a 5 hour period.
If you are only seeing 2 to 6 all night long and say that you are sleeping 6 hours....that's an AHI of less than 1 so 1 or less per hour average.

honeybadger wrote:Thank you so much. The machine is reporting that I am having 2-6 events per night. I'm assuming that number is no longer 12 due to the machine being able to prevent them. I'll definitely get my data into sleepyhead. Resmed has a web-based feedback system that i access, but its fairly basic info thats being provided (# of events, leak, hours used)

The machine reports events per hour...not per night. AHI is total events per hour. Your home study was 12 per hour.

Thank you for clarifying. I should then take this to likely mean that the machine has mechanically lowered my overall AHI/per hour? Thats a very good thing then I think.

Not sure if you saw the second page where it describes my oxygen levels, but that was kind of scary to me which was why I quickly said yes to the therapy.

In the world of desats yours weren't horribly horrible.
It was a little hard to make sense out of the O2 numbers on page 1 because in one mention it said max desat was 54% and in the chart it didn't show any time spent below 85% so maybe that was a loss of contact desat or something. Evidently whatever it was it didn't amount to enough duration to get a place on the chart.

And yes...if you are only seeing a handful of events all night now then the machine is doing its job.
As a newbie to this therapy I wouldn't be surprise if a few of those that are flagged are really awake/semi awake breathing flags that aren't really any sort of apnea event. It's common to have them if you spend any time awake and masked up. As newbies it often takes a little while to get to sleep with all this stuff hooked up to us so having a few awake events get flagged is sort of expected and I don't worry about those.
We also tend to wake up a few times in the night for no apparent reason other than the brain wants to tell you that there's something weird sitting on your face. I think it took my brain about 3 months to quit doing that.

Right now the overall numbers (even if they were all real) are greatly reduced so that's a good thing.
For now just concentrate on understanding what you see on the reports and getting adjusted to the mask and machine in general.

If you are comfortable with the starting pressure of 4 cm and your AHI is nice and low and your leaks are well managed and you are sleeping well....there's no urgent need to change anything.
Some people aren't comfortable at all with 4 cm. They feel like they are suffocating or having a hard time breathing. Technically we won't suffocate at 4 cm but it can sure feel like we are.

Thanks so much for sharing all this information. I am not really bothered by the pressure of 4, or the mask by-and-large. Sometimes, come morning time I will wake up withe pressure somewhere between 6-10 and get that suffocating feeling, but i jist tell myself that its psycological and either get up if its close to wake up time, or ty and go back to sleep otherwise.

Side question, I wonder if my 27lb weight loss is something i should be thinking about right now and whether or not i would have "events" at this new weight without the assistance of the machine.