You may be surprised to learn that the University of California San Diego has been on the forefront of high altitude and hypoxia research since 1968. I recently attended the 9th Annual Center for Physiologic Genomics of Low Oxygen Summit (CPGLO) led by Tatum Simonson PhD where I gave a short presentation on Growth At Altitude. I met Dr John West who joined the university in 1968 after a Mount Everest research expedition with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1960. He also consulted for NASA serving on the advisory committee for Spacelab. He studied medicine and physiology at the University of Adelaide.
The featured speaker was Isha Jain PhD from the University of San Francisco. Her research on mice shows how chronic hypoxia can mitigate and possibly cure some conditions, such as the devasting condition of mitochondrial disease. Colleen Julian PhD, from the University of Colorado, gave a talk on “Surviving Birth at Altitude: Genetic and Physiologic Insights”.
Other short presentations included a scientist from Florida who spoke of studying waterfowl who migrate at very high altitude as well as diving deep into the water to fish, thus adapted to two very different low oxygen environments. Among the poster presentations were a study on the effects of hypoxia on mitochondrial function in fibroblasts from loggerhead sea turtles presented by B. Gabriela Arango from the University of California Berkeley and a study on sleep apnea in self-identified Latinos.
Acknowledging that chronic hypoxia may increase the risk of depression and suicide, the benefits include decreased incidence of obesity and diabetes and lower cholesterol/LDL with decreased or unchanged hypertension. These scientists study animals to help us understand the effects of our environment on our health. At conferences like this, we discuss how what I see as a clinician could be related to their study on the cellular and genomic levels.
