jumblegirl wrote: ↑Tue Jun 21, 2022 11:32 am
Got it, so it just means I'm waking up a lot and then the machine is mislabeling as apnea.
Exactly....the machine can't tell if you are awake or asleep. All it can do is measure air flow and when we are awake the air flow or our breathing is very irregular but the machine can only see the irregularities and so it flags them. It doesn't know if we are awake and those irregularities aren't real apneas.
Ultimately it's the awake breathing that is causing the false positive flagging...and the fix for that would be obviously reduce the time awake so that the chance for false positives is reduced. Easier said than done sometimes....well all the time if truth be known.
It's very common to wake up a lot when new to cpap therapy. If nothing else just from the newness of everything.
I think it took me at least 3 months before my brain quit waking me up just from the newness of it all and I didn't have problems with leaks or comfort or pressures or anything like that. My brain would just wake me up to point out the fact that I had an alien plastered on my face blowing air up my nose....and I didn't have a problem with that fact but my brain had a problem. Then we add in real problems that might cause us to wake up like comfort or leaks or whatever....
it makes for a period of time when we simply wake up often and sometimes we just don't know why.
This is why I always expect that some flagged events that newbies are going to see are very likely those false positive flags simply from awake/arousal irregular breathing.
Now I don't presume to blame all your flagged events on awake breathing irregularities but I do suspect a sizeable chunk are going to be explained away as false positives.
This is why most doctors adopt a wait and see approach before they will even consider doing anything about anything the reports might show when someone is brand new to therapy.....because sometimes it just takes time for the person to get adjusted to the new way of doing things and have the sleep quality settle down a bit and the chances of false positive flagging diminishes.
It's why I tell people who aren't sleeping so great to work on whatever it might be that is fixable so that chances of awake breathing isn't mucking up the data. We have to be asleep for anything flagged to really matter in terms sleep apnea therapy.
It is called sleep apnea for a reason....it isn't called awake apnea.
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