Logging one's progress, would these events even be apnea?
I believe it has been stated here on AB that sleep wake junk, or "apnea" while you are awake shouldn't be counted. I found a pair of CA's that are allegedly 11 and 13 seconds long, that only start 3 seconds apart! How can they really even be 2 events? I think in this case, they should be one event. But since these CA's are during during a period which is at "wake respiration rate" are these CA's real?
Since I have been tracking my therapy to see what works, it's not good to "lie to oneself". So for the purpose of counting and tracking apnea therapy effectiveness, should one count these events towards AHI, or ignore (not count the 2 CA's) them?
RE: Logging one's progress, would these events even be apnea?
It isn't really zoomed close enough for me to see the detail but yes, they're two events because they have at least one breath between them. Looking at the chart, though, it's definitely looking like SWJ. Do you see how it went from regular breaths to big, spiky irregular breathing? That's a sign of being awake. Your tidal volume spiked too, and with bigger breaths come a higher chance of normal breathing "pauses" while awake being marked as an event. It also looks like you took a slightly bigger breath than the previous ones right before the centrals and your breathing was evened out again, so I'd safely say this was transitioning back into sleep after a wake. I'd ignore them. And honestly, even the odd "real" event isn't usually worth worrying over. One night is just one night. a lot of nights is a pattern of change that needs looking into.
RE: Logging one's progress, would these events even be apnea?
It seemed that I was awake prior the the centrals, judging by the extended low respiration rate prior to the events.
I'm tracking my stats, and I don't want to consciously or unconsciously bias them by cherry picking. Since my data is so noisy from day to day, the only way I can judge a setting is better is to try something for 25-40 days. (And run statistics on the data set - and look at smoothed trends.) So, although a single day isn't per se very important, it can change the stats. Although it may seem this is overkill, it has been a systematic way to evaluate whether some settings are working or not. Single night evaluations are far too variable to rely on, as my apnea appears to be a random process. At the start of the year, I made the realization that my apnea behaves randomly. Once I employed statistical tools, it was a lot more obvious how to make things better, and how to actually measure it was better.
In the expanded view below, there's a fraction of a breath between the CA events in OSCAR. If one hovers over the CA's individually, they start within 0.3 second of each other. And they overlap by 11 seconds, with the second one ending 1.9 seconds later than the first. Surprised that the machine flags them separately. They really look like the same event. It's moot though, since I was awake at the time. @Ratchick, thanks for your comments. I appreciate your insight.
RE: Logging one's progress, would these events even be apnea?
Yeah, if you were awake, then it's moot, but I guess that little half breath was enough to restart it again. I've seen it happen a few times on my charts and I'm like, there's barely even a blip on the SpO2 so in practice it may as well have been a single long apnea. And anything that automarks these things could miss things or mark things that we would otherwise discard.
And I feel you on the randomness. My AHI so far has varied from 9 to 58. The joys of central apnea!
