AhI Differences

[Hussy]

hi this is my first post. I just want to know if I have a problem. When I sleep well and have no problems with my mask then my AHI is about 3.4. However when I have a bad night it is 1.6! Is that because I am sleeping more deeply when it is 3.4?

[justMongo]

You have to define a "bad night."
If a bad night is disrupted by mask leaks, then the machine may not be able to detect some events.

[trish6hundred]

Hi Hussy,
WELCOME! to the forum.!
Hang in there for more answers to your questions and much success to you with your CPAP therapy.

[Hussy]

Just mungo. I suppose When I have a bad night . I mean when I am waking up frequently

[TyroneShoes]

AHI tells you how many events you had (per hour), period. It does not tell you the severity of events, nor does it tell you the makeup of events. This is a good reason to understand the differences and to use SleepyHead software to parse your data so that you have a less-fuzzy idea of what is going on.

Events disturb your sleep, to some extent, which varies. Some cause a partial arousal that you never even know about; some cause a full arousal. An identical event can arouse one person and not another. It can cause a greater O2 desat for one person that it might for another. I am not sure about this, but possibly not all arousals can be found to have a causal link to an apneic event. IOW, there may be other reasons (barking dog? Cats fu,...err...fighting?).

So while AHI is good for giving us a simplified metric regarding how we are doing, it is not very accurate, other than it flags each event and counts it. But sleep and SA are much more complex than that, so how you are really doing is also much more complex than AHI.

If you have arousals, you should research RERA. I do not have arousals and my APAP does not flag them, so I am probably not much help in that area. Others on the forum know a great deal more than I do.

[zonk]

However when I have a bad night it is 1.6! Is that because I am sleeping more deeply when it is 3.4?

Sleeping more deeply might result in more events but machine with optimal settings ought be preventing them

Profile: Resmed Airsense elite - CPAP Pressure: 4-6
AirSense 10 Elite is fixed pressure machine, not APAP