RE: Respiratory Effort Related Arousal
Your doctor is correct that RERAs can only be detected with in-lab studies. A RERA is a period of increasing respiratory effort as measured by esophageal pressure manometry or flow limitation measured by nasal cannula-pressure transducer terminating in EEG Arousal (mini brain wake-up). As your home study did not have EEG (electrodes that read your brainwaves), it is unable to report RERAs. It did however report flow limitations, which are part of the equation. CPAP manufacturers say the machines can estimate RERAs, but they are wildly inaccurate. They do however accurately report flow limitations, so you can use that data to eliminate potential RERAs by raising pressure to eliminate the flow limitations. Eliminating all flow limitations is a good idea anyway because even those that don’t end in the current narrowly defined arbitrary definition of arousal will still cause symptoms.
