Help reading charts

First of all there are some things you can do to make the screen shots more useful. One is to click on the black triangle beside the current data and suppress the whole month calendar. You can bring it back by clicking again, but when it is open it consumes useful space. Next is to get rid of that pie chart as it is redundant. On a PC you would go to File, Preferences, Appearance, and uncheck the box that says show event breakdown pie chart. Last if you still have the navigation bar on the right side, I believe F10 suppresses that, to give you more screen width. For the vertical direction I find you can click and drag on the graph dividers and scrunch them done quite a bit. I scrunch them until the title of each graph still fits.

As far as your results, your more recent ones are better than what you had a few days before that. The big gap on the Oct 2 report looks like the machine was off for that period of time, or at least did not record anything. The pressure chart indicates that your are pretty much maxing out on pressure at 11 cm. It may be possible you need more pressure. However, your CA or Central Apnea numbers are a bit high. Sometimes more pressure causes CA to go up. I would just watch it for a while more. On a DreamStation there are two traces in the leak rate graph. Ignore the top one. It includes the total leakage including the intentional purge leakage. The bottom curve is the real leakage. It should be under 24 L/min or so. For the most part you are under it, so leaks don't seem to be a big issue. Have you changed anything starting in October? Your results seem to have been better in October than in September, although your usage seems to have gone down.

That layout is much better. I tend not to find the cumulative AHI to be that useful, unless you are having clumps of events at certain times of the night. But, even then, the event flags pretty much tell the same story. Pressure, Flow Rate, and Leak Rate are important ones. Snore can be too, but it does not seem to be a problem for you. The other one I look at on a ResMed is the Minute Ventilation. It can help identify central apnea and periodic breathing issues. Not sure if the DreamStation supplies it as a graph.

What stands out in your report and machine settings is that it appears the machine is set to Auto mode, but the minimum and maximum pressure are set to the same value - 11 cm. This makes the machine operate as a fixed pressure CPAP machine, which may not be all that bad. However, if it were me, I would be tempted to set or ask to have the minimum pressure set lower -- perhaps around 8-9 cm. This would allow the machine to have some auto control, but still limit the maximum to 11 cm. This would let you see if a lower pressure might be an option for you as you will be able to correlate when events happen with respect to pressure. If most of your central events happen at a higher pressure, it can be an indication that the higher pressure is causing them, and a lower maximum pressure might be beneficial. In short it lets you see what the impact of pressure is on your apnea events. Down the road some you may very well benefit from a fixed pressure. I have an Auto machine and after much experimentation with pressure settings, I have settled on putting it in CPAP mode and setting the pressure at 11 cm.

For local irritation when getting used to a mask, I use 1% hydrocortisone cream, but for no more than a week or so. I put it on in the morning after taking the mask off and getting up.

Hope that helps some. Any questions, just ask...

The chart for that period would indicate the machine was not operating. Yes, the ResMed has an auto stop and auto start feature providing it is turned on. The SleepStation may have the same.