First 15 Min.

Checking my Data I've noticed almost every night in the first 15 minutes while I'm still awake, the machine is recording Hypopneas. Sometimes a couple of CA's thrown in also.
Just wondering if that has to do with the hose hitting the wall while adjusting it, yawning with the mask on etc. It can be confusing when still adjusting pressures with bogus data thrown in to your stats. Is this a normal occurrence to score events BEFORE you go to sleep?

Yes, It is normal.

The machine records what it senses and doesn't know if you are awake or not. If you hold your breath for 10 seconds the machine will likely try to figure out what happened. Awake breathing has less of a rhythm to it and can sometimes fool the sensors. We often will turn over in bed and hold our breath. Machine doesn't know why no air moving...only that no air is moving and will try to figure out what to call it.

For therapy evaluation just mentally toss that little bit of data out the window. Also it is common to have what we call sleep onset centrals. Sleep transition centrals. Not fully asleep and if in a sleep lab the tech would have know by the EEG that full sleep was not attained and would ignore it.

So sometimes we have to manually calculate the AHI as best we can if the "awake" events are numerous enough to really impact the numbers.

That first few minutes I lay down usually contains a lot fidgeting, yawning, coughing, etc. It is for this reason alone I use the ramp feature at nearly my required pressure for just a few minutes, so that my settling in antics aren't factored into the data.

I go through the same thing on my data Kody and pretty much ignore it. That also includes at the end of therapy also. Keep in mind when waking up we're rolling over and moving about trying to turn off our cpap, the breath is not smooth during that time also.

@kteague - You may have just reinspired me to start using my ramp feature again. Never thought of that before. It does make sense.

Starlette

Thanks everyone I appreciate your input. Your right Pugsy if I toss out the events, AND then also subtract the same amount of time the events occurred while awake it's pretty close to the original data. However I think you have to take some of these numbers as a guide since my machine and or software apparently uses "Fuzzy Math" anyway. It's close but not exact scoring the event numbers, but you can at least follow a trend.

Kody wrote: I think you have to take some of these numbers as a guide since my machine and or software apparently uses "Fuzzy Math" anyway. It's close but not exact scoring the event numbers, but you can at least follow a trend.

A few oddball events in a 15 to 30 minute window won't really make a huge impact in over all data.
Now if a person has a truckload of events then yeah they will see a huge difference.
The most remarkable I have seen were forum member RetiredAirForce I think his name is. He spends about an hour semi awake, tossing and turning and such quite often and the number of events was staggering. First time I saw it I thought "OMG what in the ..ll" Then I saw the pattern and it was so staggering it just had to be awake artifacts. No one could be that bad at sleep onset or sleep transition and have such a good report any other time.

Sometimes I will see a cluster of events right when I am usually waking up but still sort of not fully awake.
Never do much at sleep onset though.

And yes, Respironics is known for their quirky math. In time you will just glance at your reports and know what is normal for you and exact numbers won't really matter that much.

The data is pretty much meaningless when you're awake.