Help . . . What is going on with my APAP data?

I see my sleep doc tomorrow as a follow-up to a terrible Lab Titration Night when I barely slept at all. (The Tech claims I dozed off and on at the end that totaled about 2 hours, and that there were no apneas & hypopneas at a pressure of 13). Immediately following my "diagnostic" sleep lab (I did sleep all night then), I had been put on Fixed CPAP pressure of 6 . I soon upped the pressure to 8 then to 10 then to 12 prior to to Titration Night at the Lab. At 10 and 12, my daily AHI's were around 3, and I was feeling surprisingly alert during the day. I felt the difference already!

A few days after Titration Night, the office called and wanted me to take my machine to the DME and get the Autopap I have now (he had it set to 4-20. I couldn't breathe at 4, even 6 was a struggle. I decided to throw it to the wind and set it at 11-20. By now I had software and the AHI's generally stayed below 5.

Several nights, 3/5/09 included, I noticed that in the EVENTS PER HOUR TABLE . . . there were a high number of events at pressures of 15 to 18. The report below is from this period. What in the heck are all these events doing at pressures that high?

I ask this particularly since for the past week, I reset my pressure range from 11-20 down to 8-20 since I will be seeing the doctor and I wanted him to see what happened at/near the pressure range he scripted (8 being a level I could BREATHE). The 90% pressure was 10 on two nights and 12 on the others. Yet when I was set at 11-20 the weeks before, the 90% pressure ranged from 13-18.

What do you think is going on??

>> Below is the report I referred to, setting 11-20, showing a significant number of events at HIGH pressures.

[img]http://i648.photobucket.com/albums/uu20 ... 317902/img] Oops back to the drawing board on getting images up Maybe you have enough info anyway to comment . . .

Thanks for your ideas,
Joy

Oops! I think you missed a bracket on your image code near the end.

Well Kenny . . . YOU got it . . . BUT I made the image too small. I'm not much of a techie . . . back to the drawing board. This could get REALLY embarrassing . . .

JoyD. wrote:Well Kenny . . . YOU got it . . . BUT I made the image too small. I'm not much of a techie . . . back to the drawing board. This could get REALLY embarrassing . . .

Your answer might be central apneas. They have a tendancy to crop up at higher pressures...

Joy, I think the reason the photo you are trying to put into your post didn't show up is because you accidentally added some extra stuff at the end. The URL itself should have ended with .jpg

Kenny's correct that the final "img" is missing a bracket. The very end should be [/img]

So...instead of the way you wrote it out, Joy...
[img]http://i648.photobucket.com/albums/uu20 ... 317902/img]

It should be written like below... but take out the red "JD" initials I stuck in front of the first "img." I deliberately messed up the first "img" command, so that you can read the entire command. Otherwise, the picture itself would have showed up in my post.

[JDimg]http://i648.photobucket.com/albums/uu20 ... 3-5-09.jpg[/img]

Obviously I can't see your data at this point..... but something comes to mind. The data in the table are expressed in EVENTS PER HOUR and if you didn't spend more than a few minutes at those pressures any event will be inflated in the table. Let's say, for example you only spent 5 minutes at a pressure of 16 and had one hypopnea during those 5 minutes. In the table that will be expressed as 12 events per hour (1 event/5 minutes * 60 minutes/hour = 12 events/hour)

Joy, I looked through the PDF's you emailed me and found the report with the Daily Details graph you were trying to show. I took a screen shot of it and put it up on my own website, to link and show here:



I never bother to even glance at the "Daily Events per hour" table chart at the bottom. I look only at the "Daily Details" (those words are cut off the top of the picture I posted) graph itself.

by Guest on Tue Mar 17, 2009 3:16 pm

Obviously I can't see your data at this point..... but something comes to mind. The data in the table are expressed in EVENTS PER HOUR and if you didn't spend more than a few minutes at those pressures any event will be inflated in the table. Let's say, for example you only spent 5 minutes at a pressure of 16 and had one hypopnea during those 5 minutes. In the table that will be expressed as 12 events per hour (1 event/5 minutes * 60 minutes/hour = 12 events/hour)

The above explains so much. Of course! Now I won't worry about THESE TYPES of high numbers Thanks for your input, guest!!

Rested Gal:
Thank you so much for going to the trouble of fetching my report and putting it on your website to post for me. You are so kind! Now . . . I need to figure out how to do it myself for "next time"