If Events are Less than 5 - Do Leaks Matter

[Cbcb]

My events are usually less than 2. I sleep soundly seven hours. I use an AirFit P10 nasal mask and it Is comfortable.
I regularly have leaks according to My Air.
Do I have to be concerned?

[D.H.]

Leaks can certainly create comfort and noise issues, especially if you don't sleep alone.

First of all, leaks near you face can get in your eyes. You don't want that.

Second, leaks can blow on your bed partner and/or disturb him/her with the noise.

Lastly, even if your numbers are OK, leaks indicate that your therapy is not ideal.

[Pugsy]

It depends on you how big the leak is and how long it lasts....but yes....leaks can matter and sometimes matter a lot.

[robysue1]

I regularly have leaks according to My Air.
Do I have to be concerned?

As pugsy said, it depends on how large the leaks are and how long they last.

Unfortunately that can be tough to figure out from just the MyAir dashboard score where leaks are assessed with a Mask Seal number between 0 (bad) and 20 (excellent) because there's no real information on how that number is calculated.

When you click on the Mask Seal link for more information, the numbers in the chart are your 95% leak rate number for each night. If the 95% leak rate is 10 L/min, that means that for 95% of the night, your unintentional leak rate was at or BELOW 10 L/min, which is well under Resmed's official Large Leak definition of 24 L/min. In general, if your 95% leak rate is well below 24 L/min, then you don't need to worry too much about leaks as long as they're not waking you up during the night and they're not causing problems like waking up with an extremely dry mouth in the morning. (It is worth noting: in my own data I have nights where my 95% leak rate is as high as 16 L/min, but MyAir still gives me a Mask Seal of 20.)

When looking at the machine's on-board "My Sleep View" report, there will be two pieces of information about leaks: Near the top of the report there will be a face icon labeled something like "mask seal". If Mr Red Frowny Face shows up, then you had leaks of 24 L/min or greater for at least 75% of the night. If Mr. Green Smiley Face shows up, then you had leaks of 24 L/min or greater for no more than 75% of the night. Near the bottom of the My Sleep View report, the 95% Leak Rate will be shown in L/min. (If the person who set your machine up selected "On" instead of "Plus" for the Essentials setting in the clinical menu, then you won't see the full My Sleep View report.)

Thus the Resmed engineers and programmers have decided that if the unintentional leaks are 24 L/min for at least 25% of the night, then the leaks are both large enough and long enough to adversely affect the efficacy of the CPAP therapy---in other words, apneas and hypopneas might be occurring during those long large leaks that are not being detected by the machine. So if Mr. Red Frowny Face shows up a lot on the machine's sleep report, then you've definitely got a leak problem that needs to be addressed.

Most folks around here, however, would want more information than "Mr Red Frowny Face showed up" on the machine's sleep report since that by itself doesn't give you any idea of when the leaks were actually occurring and how long and how large each individual leak was. And in order to find that out, you really do need to use Oscar or SleepHQ since they allow you to see the leak rate graph that tells you exactly when the leaks happened and how large each leak was.