Don't panick over leakage

[tlippy]

Started CPAP May 2018.  Went thru a period of trying different configurations,  ie:  Nose Pillows, Large silicone full face, Medium silicone and F20 foam.  They all leaked - and still do.  I also quit taking the SD card out of my Resmed, firing up a computer and viewing my nightly progress.  I only use Resmed's My Air to check how I'm doing.  My leakage seems to start after 5 hours of use - usually while sleeping on my side.  Anyway to shorten this story:  When I check MyAir I'm getting a score of 100% - even when I'm thinking I have a big leak.  I know SleepyHead gives more info but all I want is to know if CPAP is effective.  The moral:  Don't sweat a little leak

[Fats Drywaller]

What do your leak-rate numbers look like? The rule of thumb, I think, is that anything under 24 liters per minute is OK.

[mesenteria]

.. The moral:  Don't sweat a little leak

Good advice, as well as philosophy, which I adopted very shortly after learning of SleepyHead and beginning to take occasional note of its findings a year ago.

MyAir gives me a rough 'n ready appraisal each morning of whether-or-not I managed to eke out a decent amount of sleep and tells me whether the machine controlled my apnea/hypopneas well enough to keep my AHI under 5.  They're always under 1.2, so far, with an average running near 0.5. 


I know I leak...it's obvious once or twice a night when I feel I should turn over and partially awaken; maybe because of the leaking in the first place.  When I cross-reference my week with SleepyHead, I find there's simply nothing remarkable.  Carry on.....

[tlippy]

What do your leak-rate numbers look like?  The rule of thumb, I think, is that anything under 24 liters per minute is OK.

[Fats Drywaller]

I see that myAir doesn't report liters/minute. (The machine itself does.) I guess that's considered too advanced. :consternation:

[djont57]

Click on the arrow to the right of "20/20"; it shows a bar chart of actual readings as reported by the Resmed. Then 'hover' your mouse over any bar & the actual reading in liters per min will pop up.

[Fats Drywaller]

Oh, that's good, thanks. I apologize to the poor Resmed programmers for misjudging them. (As if they cared.)

Anyroad, I agree that leaks are often not worth being concerned about. There's a limit, of course. Or as the saying goes, you have to draw the line somewhere. I do tend to pay attention to the previous night's AHI number first, and then, during the day, to whether I feel tired. If AHI=low and tired=no, then everything's fine, pretty much.

(Correction: It'd be the product manager, not the programmers. Fortunately, I haven't had anything to do with that corporate nonsense in a long time, so I tend to forget. Blissfully.)

[MyronH]

Started CPAP May 2018.  Went thru a period of trying different configurations,  ie:  Nose Pillows, Large silicone full face, Medium silicone and F20 foam.  They all leaked - and still do.  I also quit taking the SD card out of my Resmed, firing up a computer and viewing my nightly progress.  I only use Resmed's My Air to check how I'm doing.  My leakage seems to start after 5 hours of use - usually while sleeping on my side.  Anyway to shorten this story:  When I check MyAir I'm getting a score of 100% - even when I'm thinking I have a big leak.  I know SleepyHead gives more info but all I want is to know if CPAP is effective.  The moral:  Don't sweat a little leak

Unfortunately it doesn't apply to me. Any little leaks can cause me to have major obstructions. I have "mild" apnea, AHI 7 when tested. But any leaks I get can cause runs of 20-45 second obstructions all in a row, all within a few minutes time. Same thing if I don't wear a cervical collar. What happens is that these run of obstructions caused me to go into AFIB in 2017. I was in AFIB for 9 hours in the hospital  and I don't want that to happen again.