Interpreting Oximeter results

[Sn00zeAlarm]

Because I note the time if I wake up while dreaming. Usually because I am gasping for air. Also a noticeably elevated pulse rate matches those times. I don't claim to catch every REM episode this way but it is pretty obvious on the charts.

[krelvin]

Kinda what I thought you were going to say... but it isn't really that obvious since you can dream without REM sleep.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22647346

Dreaming without REM sleep.

To test whether mental activities collected from non-REM sleep are influenced by REM sleep, we suppressed REM sleep using clomipramine 50mg (an antidepressant) or placebo in the evening, in a double blind cross-over design, in 11 healthy young men. Subjects were awakened every hour and asked about their mental activity. The marked (81%, range 39-98%) REM-sleep suppression induced by clomipramine did not substantially affect any aspects of dream recall (report length, complexity, bizarreness, pleasantness and self-perception of dream or thought-like mentation). Since long, complex and bizarre dreams persist even after suppressing REM sleep either partially or totally, it suggests that the generation of mental activity during sleep is independent of sleep stage.

An Oximeter measures SaO2 and your pulse, not sleep stages and as such is not a good tool to guess what stages of sleep you might be having. It by itself it is not necessarily a good tool to see if you have OSA either.

To test if you are really having what you think you are having you need to get a real test. There are some home tests which provide the ability to do some brain monitoring.

[TyroneShoes]

...when I had my first sleep study, they found in the 3+ hours I was getting 0 REM sleep none...

I am going to go just a shade OT (and I agree with all of your points on topic) but you have described what for many is their experience in a sleep study, which is short (~5 hours) to begin with. Being in a foreign environment, unfamiliar bed, 23 wires glued all over your body, techs running in and out, infrared cams spying on you, and under a level of tension much different than when sleeping for 8 hours in your own bed, it seems like 3 hours of light sleep might be the norm, which is one of many reasons that the PSG study is somewhat flawed, and is a very small, skewed data sample.

It's sadly not all that surprising that you registered no REM sleep in your study.

Good APAP data taken at home over weeks of being in a normal sleep situation might be actually more valuable in many ways.

[quiescence at last]

I too have felt it easy to come to the conclusion (perhaps wrong) that my recall of having dreamed seems to correlate to the presence of certain things in my pulse rate, type of breathing, respiration rate, etc. It just isn't as scientifically solid as the truth machines (EEG brain waves). The data is observed, so somewhat plausible.

I like the idea of having a home use EEG device, and hope to get one soon for better observational data to back up the conclusions I have made.

BTW. The SaO2 drop index is just the average number of times your SaO2 dropped (the designated amount) per hour.

Question. In your chart, copied below, did you do one of your gasping for air awakenings at the 6:16 point, and then remember your dreaming once you settled down at 6:18, nodding off back to sleep at 6:20?


http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/attachm...bnail=1475





QAL

[Sn00zeAlarm]

Update 6 months later. After the first sleep study found no "diagnosable" apnea, the doctor agreed to let me do my own home study using a recording oximeter over an entire week. The "official" home study, with a recording oximenter provided by a DME Provider runs for only one night and costs $80. For half that amount a bought my own oximeter and recorded data for a week.

The resulting data convinced the doctor that there is indeed a problem - it just does not happen all the time. It is clearly a combination of Obstructive and Central apnea. It is only when the two combine that the SPO2 shows diagnosable drops below 88% for the required 30 seconds more than 5 times per hour. I easily get 3 times that, one event every 90 seconds for an hour at a time. But not constantly. It is enough to mess up my REM sleep.

So the puzzle is to get this to happen during a formal sleep study. So we are going to do the sleep study again but this time with me taking an Ambien to make sure I fall asleep right away. The bed in the study lab is, of course, not anywhere as comfortable as the one at home, even bringing my own pillow.

I told him that I am willing to pay for the machine outside of insurance if he really thinks there is a problem, and he was open to that. And he said "I can't tell you this of course, but there are places to buy the machine without a prescription." So I should be able to get treatment whether or not the official study comes back positive. I have to get enough events in the early part of the experiment so that the technician will put the hose on me for some initial titration.

Now for central apnea, my understanding is that the machine has to be able to force air into me even without me demanding it. Does this prelcude the use of a nasal pillow mask? What are my options here? I want to get the best machine for my purpose, including data recording, not the minimal one. My wife is nervous about full-face masks.