cross those fingers

I lent my suffering neighbor my pulse oximeter. I hope he uses it tonight. He is thinking he should buy an auto cpap and skip the sleep lab. I told him let's have one step at a time...

elader wrote:I lent my suffering neighbor my pulse oximeter. I hope he uses it tonight. He is thinking he should buy an auto cpap and skip the sleep lab. I told him let's have one step at a time...

I hope your neighbor takes advantage of your experience and listens to your advice.

And thanks for changing your avatar. That other one, although funny as hell, was frightening.

I think your neighbor has no idea how lucky they are to have you and your expertise nearby, elader.

BTW, two cool avatars above!

Awww. I love the guy. he bought a nice bike to ride with me and managed one ride in two months. He is either at work or he is asleep. As long as he is willing to try a self administered overnight, I am willing to lend him my M series Auto and record him for a night. Only thing he'll miss is a 'real study', where they can use an EEG and figure out how bad his sleep actually is. I am hoping he just gives in and does a real study.

(once the monkey fad fades, I'll be back to my old ugly self again.. )

elader wrote:I lent my suffering neighbor my pulse oximeter. I hope he uses it tonight. He is thinking he should buy an auto cpap and skip the sleep lab. I told him let's have one step at a time...

Fingers crossed...and that is a wonderful thing to do. BTW, I LOVE your little monkey...good job!!!!!!!!!
mar

You're a good neighbor, and BTW I liked your other avatar better when you were in incognito!

Well, that little monkey is certainly crossing his fingers together with all of us.
Lucky neighbor - and in a sense lucky you too, elader. It's feels so good when someone lets us help them.
O.

Results

So over an 8 hour sleep, my neighbor had like one desat event every 30 minutes -hour. Smooth O2 and heart curve would get all out of sorts. Typically lasted five minutes, with dips into sub 90%, hitting 87% (baseline at 96%) - corresponding spike in heart rate from 75bpm to 110-115bpm. Obviously this is ONLY the events that were strong enough to register as a drop in O2 levels.

His data looks way better than mine, but I don't know what 'normal' looks like. When I am on cpap, I have maybe one or two desats to 90 percent per night. So I think he is affected, yes?

I told him to go have a sleep study. What else could we do? Hook him up to the cpap and let him snooze at 12cM and get some data?

You've got an APAP. If you wanted to hook him up, put him in 5-20 and let the APAP sort it out.

Elader, if that's this neighbor that you talked about in April:

elader wrote: He put on weight suddenly, has a weak chin, is taking naps in the afternoons ("just so tired"), has trouble concentrating, snores so loud, his wife sleeps with a pillow over her head, has night sweats, gets up to pee frequently at night, says he doesn't dream, has nighttime heartburn, wakes up tired. .. but "has no trouble falling asleep"

...then he definitely needs a sleep study IMHO.

You might even suggest that he show up to his first office evaluation with these two filled out:
http://www.alegent.com/documents/Sleep_eval.pdf


Good luck!

Some of us can't afford a full blown study. I did a home study. Is not what all of the data comes down to is what the oxygen saturation dips to over time? So are we really talking the need of only a $300 device clipped on a finger to do a quick and easy prescreening for sleep apnea problems?

Husky Lover wrote:Is not what all of the data comes down to is what the oxygen saturation dips to over time?

Unfortunately that's often not the case. If it were the case, sleep studies would only need one data channel: SpO2. Right?

But breathing-related sleep arousals often wreck sleep and health without significant oxygen desaturations. Then there's that conservative statistic of more than 15% of the patient population having central, complex, or mixed apneas that require multiple channels to differentiate. And, of course, there are eighty-some sleep disorders besides apnea that sometimes occur in various combinations.

Husky Lover wrote:Some of us can't afford a full blown study. I did a home study.

In that case, a home study is far better than no study IMHO. And some home studies offer a good number of PSG data channels. But considering what elader does for a living, I suspect his neighbor can afford to buy a round of sleep studies for the entire cul de sac.

Husky Lover wrote: So are we really talking the need of only a $300 device clipped on a finger to do a quick and easy prescreening for sleep apnea problems?

A $300 pulse oximeter would having a pretty good "specificity of measurement" for detecting sleep disordered breathing problems in general. That means test positive, and you probably have at least one of several undifferentiated sleep disordered breathing conditions. But the "sensitivity of measurement" for sleep disordered breathing would probably be kind of mediocre---meaning test negative and you still may have a serious sleep disordered breathing condition looming.

Then, of course, I mentioned above the recording oximeter is going to miss other common sleep problems that many of us have, like periodic limb movements or bruxism. And if we have any PVCs or arrhythmias during sleep, the $300 device won't be able to spot those occasionally interrelated but extremely important cardiovascular presentations.

There's a lot to be said for a complete sleep study in the lab, since years of unchecked apnea places us at significant risk for a variety of interrelated health problems or comorbidities.

I know this is an oversimplification, but since I'm only at grammar school level on this subject, I can see with my own eyes that my husband's oxygen levels are probably within normal limits now because his facial tone has lost it's pallor and he's now back to his handsome Sicilian ruddiness again. That is also something our Internist was pleased to see when he last examined him.