Hey guys

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 10, 2020 9:52 am

That entire segment you show appears to be arousal related breathing to me. Can't see the breathing pattern immediately prior to that segment but if that were my report I would chalk those flagged events up to arousal related and thus they don't count.

A few weeks ago I had a night with AHI of 9.4. Unusual for me for sure so I looked more closely and I manually counted and looked at each flagged event. 90% of those flagged events were so obviously arousal/awake related that a blind man could see it.
It also happened to be a night where I slept poorly due to back pain. I had done some yard work outside that I paid for in the middle of the night. I over did things. I knew I woke up often because I hurt like hell.

Now sometimes we do have real asleep events that cause the subsequent arousal breathing and flagging. So sometimes a real event ends up causing a lot of false positive events. So if we see that happening a lot then obviously we want to reduce those primary real events and the best way to do that...more baseline pressure or allow the machine to auto adjust if the machine is capable.
My own AHI is very rarely more than 25% real events. The bulk of my AHI is always arousal related and not related to real events causing the arousals so I don't see the need to use more pressure.

Juggsy75 wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 10, 2020 11:00 am

wish I knew how to engage the semi auto mode my nurse spoke about to see if it helps

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 18, 2020 10:58 am

I would have liked to see the report with the minimum of 8.0 along with comments about how you feel and how you slept.
That's what I was waiting for. I don't really do much or say much with a number only to go on.

As for the missing graph lines. I have no idea except maybe a corrupt data file.

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 19, 2020 11:13 am

When you remember dreams it isn't a good thing. It means you woke up during a dream or right at the end of the dream so remembering a lot of dreams means you woke up a lot and it's the waking up a lot that is the problem.
Now why the wake up happened...that's an unknown. It could be airway related or it might be something else.

3 nights and 2 of them were decent enough nights. The one ugly night I don't know if those flagged events are false positive arousal/awake related events or real asleep apnea related events. When we wake up a lot and toss and turn a lot the irregular awake breathing will often get flagged as some sort of apnea event but if we aren't asleep they don't count. The machine doesn't know though because it only measures air flow. It has no way to know if we are asleep or not.

So...was the ugly AHI night on the 18th a night where you didn't sleep or great and the AHI mainly false positive flagged events (sometimes called SWJ or sleep/wake/junk) or did something special happen to make the airway more difficult to hold open...like maybe more on your back or something like that???
We don't know.
You can learn to evaluate the flow rate to get sort of an idea if you were asleep when those flagged events happened. Watch all the videos here.
http://freecpapadvice.com/sleepyhead-free-software
Takes a lot of watching and evaluating and sometimes even then it's hard to tell for sure but you can usually get a close enough idea to get you in the ball park.

Since 2 out of 3 nights were decent....continue with the 8 cm pressure for 4 more nights so we have a full week at this pressure and lets see if you have more good nights or more bad nights.

Try to figure out why you have some nights where you don't sleep so great if you can. Keep a log of how you slept and feel along with anything that might be a factor. Late meals...alcohol....stress...etc.

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 19, 2020 2:18 pm

Try to quit stressing over numbers. It will just make things worse and there's nothing you can do about water under the bridge anyway.
We all have bad nights occasionally. Heck a couple of weeks ago I had a 9.4 AHI night and I have been on cpap over 11 years now.
Crap happens...even to cpap veterans.

Some years ago I was doing some fixed pressure experiments and I picked a setting that gave me good "numbers" and decided to keep it for 6 weeks. Watched the numbers go up and down and sometimes a lot up but I knew that I got some good numbers once and I felt I could do it again. Mtore and more the good nights started to out number the bad nights and at the end of 6 weeks and I never changed a thing my AHI was 50% less consistently than when I started at the beginning of the experiment. The bad nights became extremely rare.

But....like I said we can still have some bad nights...and mine are always related to awakening/arousal breathing false positives or at least the bulk of them.
I might have 40 flagged events during an 8 hour session and only 5 of those events are real.
So AHI of 5.0....really is a 1.6 AHI