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Advice on interpreting Oscar Flow Rate Chart
#1
Advice on interpreting Oscar Flow Rate Chart
Hello all - I've seen some youtube videos mention this but it is 100% clear to me so I am hoping it is more clear to others.  

Does anyone have examples of what CA and OA events look like in the flow rate chart of Oscar?

I am wondering if some of the events I am seeing are related to me tossing and turning, i.e. actually awake. I've noticed I sometimes hold my breath when turning over etc.  Not sure how common that is.  I also see some CA events that happen when I know was awake and just hadn't yet got up and turned off the machine.  

I am curious about how to recognize real events. 

For example this, the first screenshot: CA-flow1 -- I look like I am sleeping fine, with normal flow, but then there is some disruption before the CA.... does this mean I am waking up and this causing the CA or is the noise before the CA actually part of the CA.

   

or the second screenshot: CA-flow2

   

or the third screenshot: CA-flow3 - when I can tell from other data that I was moving around and I think I triggered a leak before the CA event - this was close to waking up too - the corresponding leak data for this one is leak-for-flow3 - (which I guess I need to post in a separate post as I seem limited to three attachments).

   

I don't have many OA events but they tend to look like the fifth screenshot OA-flow5.  Again it looks like there is a pattern of normal flow (which I assume means normal sleep) and then some noise before the OA.

I know people are supposed to post the entire screenshot etc for full analysis but I am trying to see if I can learn more about how to use this specific chart and interpret the flow rate.  If this is the wrong route to go then I please let me know, but if there is info people can see in these charts I am interested in how they are interpreting them so I can look at future flow charts and learn useful things from them.

Here are the other two attachments I couldn't post in my first post.

       
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#2
RE: Advice on interpreting Oscar Flow Rate Chart
Hi and welcome to the board!

You're correct - all of those look like what can be termed "Sleep-Wake Junk" - where something happens (either sleep-related or otherwise) that causes some kind of arousal - a leak, as in one of your examples, or another hypopnea/apnea/rRERA, or waking a little to roll over, and this can cause both central and obstructive events to be marked even though they can be safely ignored. If you look before some of those it's very clear that your breathing becomes more erratic and often deeper, which is a sign of arousal of some kind a lot of the time. Also, sometimes, you will just see (especially with centrals) a big deep breath right before the apnea. This, again, is entirely normal and means as you woke, you took a bigger than normal breath, which blew out some extra carbon dioxide, and so you simply didn't need to breathe for a little longer. This can happen regularly when you're awake, as well as at the start of your recordings where your body is in that phase of switching from "awake breathing control" to "asleep breathing control". Hence the term, Sleep-Wake Junk. Smile
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#3
RE: Advice on interpreting Oscar Flow Rate Chart
Thanks for the welcome and the answers to my questions  Smile

I wonder, does anyone have any screenshots of what normal (i.e. not associated with this "sleep/wake" noise) CA or OA would look like in the Flow Rate chart?
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#4
RE: Advice on interpreting Oscar Flow Rate Chart
There are some examples in the wiki but a great example in another poster's charts can be seen here - the second image in the first post is a beautiful example of central apnea and periodic breathing.

It's actually possible that your OA example could be a genuine sleep event (though really, we'd need to see the full chart to be sure). Honestly, I'm far better at reading centrals, as I have Central Sleep Apnea and only the odd Obstructive (which are almost all SWJ LOL).

If you're really interested in understanding the flow chart a bit more, I'd recommend looking here and more generally here.
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