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AHI while I am awake???
#1
AHI while I am awake???
Hello again,
Another thing that is really strange is the fact that I am experiencing a large number of incidents whilst I am lying awake trying to get back to sleep.
This morning I woke at around 5.00 and then tried to get back to sleep for an hour. In that time I experienced at least 35 CA and 4 OA. This is a little weird and is affecting my overall AHI to the point that it may give the doctor the wrong information.
When I did go back to sleep, even though it was for a short time, my AHI went back to a lower level.
I did experience a lot of leaks last night and my AHI was over 15 with around 10.5 being CAs. My average AHI over the last three weeks (since I started) is over 13 but large lumps are these CAs where I am lying still and trying to get to sleep.
Does anybody else experience this?
Don
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#2
RE: AHI while I am awake???
I see weird AHI numbers when I'm awake as well. Especially if I woke up and I'm trying to get back to sleep. Lay there, bored, half awake, breathing, yawning, not breathing while shifting around. It's all abnormal compared to the breathing pattern when you are asleep and they get logged as whatever anomaly the machine thinks it is seeing at the moment. I hate it if I wake up early and tell myself I can get another 45 minutes of sleep and then bag it and just get up after 20 minutes. I notice the AHI when I first woke up was like 1.x and then after 20 minutes awake before I give up, I turn off the machine and the AHI has bumped up t 3.x.

I don't remember seeing big numbers like 35 CA in my awake time. Are you saying 35 tick marks on sleepyhead during that part of the timeline or some normalized hourly number?

If you are looking at session time on the CPAP machine display for less than an hour session, those are probably scaled up to an hourly AHI rate and fragged out among the OA, CA, etc on the machine display. Remember each time you turn off the machine and turn it back on that's a new session. Short sessions of awake time could have squirrelly numbers, too.

As for raw numbers... I guess if you are awake and tired but restless for an hour, then some perceived anomaly in your breathing every two minutes of being awake may not be not out of line. If you yawned every two minutes for an hour that would be thirty right there. Shift around, roll over, back and forth a few times trying to be more comfortable and you could probably get to 35 breathing anomalies pretty easily in an hour.

Anyways, you can expect to see some anomalies in AHI if you run the machine while you are awake. How much to expect I can't say, only what I see when it happens to me.

If this is an occasional occurrence, then the doc will see that as one-off anomalies in an otherwise consistent pattern when you look at the Overview report. A few bad nights in the past sixty days of data. Impact on the Statistics report is probably pretty small, too. Let's say you sleep 7 hours per night, or 420 hours between doc appointments. If ten percent of the nights you add an hour with awake events, then that would be 6 hours of out of 426 hours. Probably negligible impact.

I could be wrong about that, but that's how I would look at it.

Don't lose any more sleep over it, it will just mess with your numbers even more Smile.

Saldus Miegas
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#3
RE: AHI while I am awake???
Strange as it may seem, we tend to hold our breath a lot when awake. We toss and turn, holding our breath when we do.
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#4
RE: AHI while I am awake???
(10-28-2015, 10:21 AM)PoolQ Wrote: Strange as it may seem, we tend to hold our breath a lot when awake. We toss and turn, holding our breath when we do.
I often find myself either holding my breath or breathing very shallow, quick breaths while awake. I notice the same pattern that SH classifies as CAs. They often occur immediately before I wake up and turn off the machine. I ignore them. I'm not saying you should ignore CAs, but I think it is very common.

When I first began therapy, I would sit for an hour or two fully awake using the machine while watching TV or reading. SH always reported both CAs and OAs during the sessions. Overall the software is useful and reasonably accurate, but it seems to be a tad too sensitive for me. It is a "one size fits all" approach and can't be expected to know what is normal for a particular user.

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#5
RE: AHI while I am awake???
It is not a matter of sensitivity. It is because the machine does not know that you are awake. It is also that the user does a lot of these things while awake or semi-awake without realizing it.

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#6
RE: AHI while I am awake???
(10-28-2015, 03:52 PM)PaytonA Wrote: It is not a matter of sensitivity. It is because the machine does not know that you are awake. It is also that the user does a lot of these things while awake or semi-awake without realizing it.
That's what I mean (poor choice of words perhaps). If it knew I wasn't asleep, it could just shut down recording but continue operating, like in a "training" mode. That would be a special circumstance.

But if I'm using the machine during a sleep session, and I awaken for a while, it doesn't know I've awakened, so it still thinks I'm asleep and continues to record events that are normal to me while awake, but they are added to the total event count.

For example, I see a lot of CAs just before I turn off the machine and get up, and I'm pretty sure they were recorded while I was awake and should not be counted in the total AHI. There doesn't seem to be any way for the machine to figure this out.

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#7
RE: AHI while I am awake???
This is where the graphing software can really shine. You can actually look at the graph and disregard any portions that you know were scored while you were awake. For me, that means the first 30 minutes and usually the last 30 minutes. Often there is about 15 minutes that occur around 3:30 am that I also disregard since I remember waking up at that time.

With those areas out of the mix, I have no problem using the nice graph that Sleepyhead renders and coming up with a true AHI for my sessions.

I wish there was some easy way to log the awake time but alas, it's not so easy. I'll bet something will be created when/if the cpap community makes the demand strong enough so that it will be economically feasible.

Dude
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#8
RE: AHI while I am awake???
Yup, I noticed that a lot when I first starting using CPAP. However, I have also realized (and been told), that oftentimes when you think you are awake, you really are asleep. You just don't realize it.
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