CPAPtalk.com

Been on CPAP 5 weeks now with good results.
Had my best night so far last nigh with .77 AHI
Blood pressure is coming down slowly.
I am feeling well rested.

Ok had to mention my good results.

My question in regard to leaks.
My best result last night of .77 had 3.21% leaking above the threshold.

Does leaking skew the AHI results?
or should I be concerned mainly with leaking having an affect on my apnea episodes?

I use nose pillows and have leak issues probably 40% of the time that result in being over the leak threshold.

BTW what is the leak threshold number that I should be concerned about?

The more you leak the more it affects how therapeutic your therapy is, so Ahi will be affected as well, but it doesn't change your apneas themselves in any way, only the treatment.

motownmike wrote: 3.21% leaking above the threshold.

What machine are you using?
You are showing a Respironics humidifier so I assume a Respironics machine.

SleepyHead defaults to the ResMed 24 L/min threshold and if you leave it at 24 L/min SH will likely tell you that you had some time in large leak....it's an error.

Look at your events graph... The LL up on the events graph is for Large Leak. If you don't see anything up there then you didn't have any large leaks despite what SH says.

We don't have a set fixed threshold for Respironics Large Leak because it varies with the pressure and mask and if you use auto adjusting pressures it's going to vary a lot.
Generally if you use 60 to 70 L/min you will be close.

That said...3% of the night in large leak...even if it were real is not that big of a deal.
Out of 7 hours that's a little over 12 minutes out of the entire night and that's not all that bad at all.
And remember if the data is in question due to large leak it is only in question during the time of large leak.

Pugsy,

Thank you.
Very informative answer.

My machine is the
Philips Resperonics System One REMstar Pro C-Flex+