Health

able to properly tell the difference between obstructive apneas and central apneas.

Obstructive - your airway is obstructed and that's pretty obvious to detect. My wife, in 2005, said I would stop breathing then suddenly start again. Sleep test easily confirmed it.
Central - your brain forgets to breathe momentarily. Very dangerous. My central numbers were high enough that, by themselves, justified the machine. Bad for the heart.

VERY foolish not to have the test. I've now had it multiple times. No pain, no day lost from work. No invasive procedure. They just have you sleep with a machine and you should also be able to decide what is best mask for you. The latter is critical to successful use.

You have to be persistent to get used to it or you will be one of the many people who just give it up. For the first month, I could only use it for 2 hours before taking it off for the rest of the night. A month later, I was up to 4 hours. A month after that, all night. Never looked back.

I had 30 apneas/hour in original test. My younger brother had 100!

Interesting story (at least to me): I got the CPAP just days before I went to NOL for Katrina as a Red Cross volunteer so I decided not to take it. BIG MISTAKE! The first night, they put about 60 of us up in cots in one big room (men & women intermixed) at an old K-Mart then sent us to our assignment. I slept just fine without it but the next morning everyone was complaining that someone snored all night and they couldn't sleep. I just slunk in the corner as I knew who was responsible as my wife had complained for many months about how loud I was. Needless to say, in my second tour of Katrina and all other tours to disasters, I took my CPAP. In the first Katrina tour, they assigned 2 to each hotel room but I was accidentally assigned with a woman who had a male-sounding name so they immediately gave us a room to ourselves and forgot so I had a private room and wasn't murdered by an angry roommate. On the second tour, my male roommate had issues so was sent home after a few days and, again, I was by myself. After that, I was fully used to the machine for all future disasters and never snored again so my bride of 51 years didn't smother me with a pillow.