When do you check your Data?

palerider wrote:
never tried... don't feel there's that much of a correlation besides, my days are usually < 2

I don't care enough to try and work it out myself

I wouldn't either with those numbers

sleepy1235 wrote:I check my data weekly.

You can feel poorly in the morning because your head straps are on too tight and other reasons.

I don't find AHI particularly useful. You can be having other sleep problems which aren't recognized as AHI, such as RERA's.

Good point. Thank you. My sleep test yielded an AHI of 4 but RDI of 17. I guess like some other newbies (5 months), I've gotten overly concerned with my numbers. There is so much to learn.

Day_Dreamer wrote:
Can you predict what it will be based on how you felt all day?

Ie.. My head hurt all day... I must've had a bad night.

The only time i feel bad and have a head that hurts is if i've had too much to drink the night before.
I do not play too much attention to the AHI these days. I have a Resmed S9, Respironics PR One and a F&P Icon. They all score the AHI differently. With the S9 I've a month of 0 AHI.

I do like to keep an eye on my pressure though. I was titrated at 7cm my pressure is set to 4.4cm to 8cm. If I notice i'm not 100% good on a given day its usually because my pressure was going up and down all night and averaging nearer 7cm, even though my AHI will be good. Most of the time when i'm feeling good I find the pressure was almost constantly around 4.6cm.

I mentioned to my sleep doctor that some days i can feel a little off. His reply was that my AHI is good so there is nothing else he could do.

Day_Dreamer wrote:Hi.

I had been checking my Data every morning since the start of CPAP. On those days where it exceeded 4, I thought I was able to detect the physical affects of breeching a 4. I would come to work and think I had a bad night, my head really hurts. I have found this to be all in my mind as recently I stopped checking in the morning and could not accurately predict my results base on how I felt. I tried for a few weeks to predict when I broke the mild apnea barrier of 4. Some days I was sure I had a 4-6 on my machine only to find I had a 2. Other days I was clear headed and swore I would see a 2 or less only to find a 7.


So when do you check your data?

If you check it at night can you accurately predict what kind of sleep you had the previous night based on how you feel?

I've been on CPAP therapy since April. I check my data every morning, first on the LCD screen, then the more detailed data after popping the SD card into my computer and entering the data in SleepyHead. I confess I obsess a bit too much about having "good AHI" nights, and am trying to break myself of the habit. I haven't been able to correlate how I feel during the day, or how I slept the previous night, to any AHI numbers; I almost always feel good during the day, and I normally sleep soundly, or at least that is my impression, correct or not. Nor can I correlate the numbers to my behaviour, dreams, or whatever. I sometimes have vivid dreams, and more often than not, I do run a higher AHI number on those nights, but occasionally a very low number too. Ditto for drinking alcohol at night. I sometimes have a few drinks, and run my lowest AHI numbers, and some nights when I abstain I run the highest.

I've been averaging around an AHI of 5.0 since starting this, and I've been constantly fiddling with the settings to try to get the numbers down, but so far, not much luck. 5.0 is not bad, but I'd like to see lower numbers. However, just turning up the pressure on both the low and high ends so far has not worked for me; that actually drove my AHI numbers up. Right now I'm in a leave-it-alone and try to be happy with what I've got mode.

When I got a data-capable machine, I was checking the data every morning for awhile. As time's gone on, I check (download it) only on Sunday mornings and save that week's data to my pc. I just glance at it to see if anything needs attention. So far, so good.

BleepingBeauty wrote:When I got a data-capable machine, I was checking the data every morning for awhile. As time's gone on, I check (download it) only on Sunday mornings and save that week's data to my pc. I just glance at it to see if anything needs attention. So far, so good.

new toy syndrome, at it's finest

When I first started therapy I would check the data pretty much daily but tried to do it in the evening so that the data didn't create a self fulfilling prophecy as to how my day went. One of most wonderful "miracle" days after about 3 months on therapy gave me a really big surprise when I checked the data that evening. I thought for sure that I would have had one of those 0.0 AHI nights because I felt so awesome good. Wrong...my AHI was 10.2 if I remember right. Go figure that one.

It took me about 6 months of the daily checking for that to get old because the reports had become so boring so I quite checking daily and went to every few months if I thought about it.

Now I check it mainly when I might try something new just to see if the change affects anything and since using a S9 right now I try to at least get it downloaded once a week to make sure all graphs are available just in case I ever want them.
Since I long ago learned that AHI didn't govern how I felt during the day...time of day for checking is all over the place. I do it when I think about it and have time.

I have been copying the numbers from the sleep report screen into a notebook since summer of 2010.
The notebook goes along to the doctor, it helps keep their interest (treehouse, Tarzan, candy).
--(Thanks to Tattooed Lady for the awesome image)

I've been looking at the sleep report on the LCD every morning now for quite a while. Then download data to sleepyhead and look at it in more detail about once a week.

Traveling at the moment, so no downloads last couple of weeks, just the daily LCD sleep report. Seems to be doing fine none the less *smile*. More centrals than I'd like to be seeing, but nothing I can do about it. Mostly between 1 and 2, AHI-wise.