jumblegirl wrote: ↑Thu Jun 16, 2022 12:17 pm
If i look at my data the central apneas do have a flat line with normal breathing before so they do seem like they are real.
Can you zoom in on one of the centrals that you think are real and post the screen shot?
Let's make sure what you are thinking you are seeing are indeed real asleep centrals.
It's really important to evaluate the flow rate for 2 or 3 minutes PRIOR to the flagged central to make sure the person was asleep.
The thingy on the chest with the WatchPat...that's to measure effort to breathe or chest movement kind of thing.
If no effort to breathe is made and there is evidence through the other data it collects that an apnea event has occurred then the no effort at the same time means a central apnea occurred.
With a central apnea there is no effort to even try to breathe. Hold your breath for 15 seconds...just don't breathe...that's essentially a 15 second central apnea. No air is moving but it's because you didn't even try to move the air. Your chest won't move....nothing will move really.
It's normal to have a few central apneas here and there and it is to be expected. Like it is normal to have what is called a sleep onset central apnea. It can happen when we transition from awake to asleep. No big deal to have that happen say after a REM sleep cycle has ended (it's normal to wake up after the end of a REM cycle) and then we go back to sleep so another sleep onset central can happen. These centrals are not usually a problem unless they either keep bouncing a person out of sleep so they have trouble getting back to sleep or if there are so many of them that desats occur.
We don't really have enough nights with your data where you can say you slept solidly for sure and we see more centrals than we would like to see ....to warrant urgent concern. You are too new to therapy and all that.
You need to sit back and take some chill pills and concentrate mainly on just getting used to all this new stuff...and on the back burner keep one eye on the data. It took me a full 3 months for my body and brain to get happy with my new way of sleeping. My brain was frequently waking me up to say "hey dude...do you know there is an alien on your face blowing air up your nose"....
back then machines didn't flag centrals but I have no doubt that if they could have flagged centrals I would have seen a lot of them because of the wake ups.
Anytime someone who is brand new to cpap therapy seems to have centrals flagged when we wouldn't expect them we always have to keep in mind the chance of a false positive flagging. Back to those sleep onset centrals even...just from a minor arousal that we may not remember.
Even if every single one of your flagged centrals were indeed real asleep centrals you aren't having enough of them to trigger serious alarm bells. Your doctor will want to adopt a wait and see approach. Even if they are the real deal about the only thing you can do to maybe help reduce the number are the steps I outlined above.
Reducing and/or eliminating EPR....or changing to fixed pressures are the only real tweaks you can do and there's no guarantee that they will work.
You can compare you ring thingy if you want but you have to accept the fact that the ring measures what it measures and makes guesses based on what it says it measures....and the cpap machine measures what it measures and they don't measure the same thing so you can't really compare the results.
Mostly the ring is going to maybe use oxygen levels, pulse and motion sensors to help it decide what's going on. The FitBit does something similar.
The cpap machine measures air flow...it doesn't measure pulse, oxygen or how many times you might toss and turn during the night.
You really can't compare the two.
