Periodic Breathing

Be aware that CPAP machines will often flag your breathing pattern as periodic breathing when no human expert would classify it as such.

It's also possible you DO have a serious periodic breathing problem.

Someone who knows what they're doing needs to look at the airflow waveforms.

CSR as shown on S9 Autoset:

avi123 wrote:CSR as shown on S9 Autoset:

That looks like "real" CSR/Periodic Breathing.

The PRS1 machines often flag "Periodic Breathing" that are enormously less severe than that.

archangle wrote: The PRS1 machines often flag "Periodic Breathing" that are enormously less severe than that.

Yep, they sure do.
I have several such examples and that is why I don't get all excited about the actual % number until I see the wave flow itself.
Especially for a newbie who may have a lot of awake stuff mixed in.
If I had 10 PB episodes flagged...9 would look like this and is no where near as exciting as true CSR.


and 1 would maybe look like this which still does not look classic CSR either.


This was with the ResMed machine which of course doesn't flag PB but I imagine if I had been using the System One machine it would have flagged this as PB. It probably looks the most like CSR that I have had but even then not a perfect example like Avi's.


All of the above examples are relatively rare for me though. For much less than 1% of the time asleep when they do get flagged.

If I consistently saw PB being flagged (even the stuff that is not obviously CSR as in my first example) in the 5% range. I would be beating feet to the sleep doctor (who happens to be a pulmonologist) for evaluation and let him explain to me what I was seeing and tell me what I should or should not be worrying about.