I attended the 23rd International Hypoxia Symposium in Lake Louise, Canada to present some of the research on altitude I’ve been conducting in Colorado. The conference has been going on since 1979, and for the past 26 years the organizers have been Robert Roach and Peter Hackett, world-renowned medical researchers from Colorado. Meeting most of the famous altitude researchers from all over the world was an inspiration. Personal talks and sharing information were equally important to imbibing the latest knowledge about hypoxia and hemoglobin.
Antarctic Icefish: Life Without Hemoglobin, was presented by Kristen O’Brien, expanding the concept of oxygen distribution in living beings and introducing us to varieties of fish we have never heard of. Her talk was followed by our “Mice and Men” guy, Jay Storz (and colleague Graham Scott), who along with Jon Velotta mentioned in our blogpost on the show “This Podcast Will Kill You” collect the large eared deer mice from peaks such as Blue Sky Mountain to study adaptation to hypoxia in their labs. The talk recognized for first prize was on Altitude Headaches, including a discussion of migraines, by Andrew Charles.
Every evening there was a banquet and speaker. Astronaut Jessica Meir spent 210 days aboard the space station. She shared a wide range of challenges such as exercising without gravity, choosing a compatible crew, getting boxes of treats from home, and effects of prolonged weightlessness on your eyes and muscles.
The research I would like to see duplicated in Summit County was from Kyrgyzstan, where Silvia Ulrich studied the hearts and lungs of the permanent residents at 9000 feet using the six minute walk as one of her tools. They did not score higher when studied at sea level! She ran tests for pulmonary hypertension, which could be important here.
Of course, there was a talk on Sleep Disordered Breathing (sleep apnea) by Esther Schwarz, something we pay a great deal of attention to in our own clinic in Frisco, Colorado and have several research projects on the improvement we see with supplemental oxygen. The role of mitochondria in cellular function in hypoxia was presented by Dr. Christian Arias-Reyes, a researcher at Seattle Children’s Hospital who is originally from La Páz, Bolivia. I met him at the Chronic Hypoxia conference in 2019 when he was a graduate student in Quebec and again in La Páz at this year’s conference.
A deep dive into how our neurons react to hypoxia in the brain by releasing nitric oxide to dilate blood vessels and preserve circulation reenforced the counseling I do here in my clinic to parents whose children have breath holding spells or babies with dips in their oxygen on home monitors. Along with all the millions of children and adults living at 12,000 feet in Bolivia, we can witness that hypoxia does not cause brain damage. (Not to be confused with anoxia, a complete lack of oxygen.)
Lastly, Nobel prize winner and fellow pediatrician Gregg Semenza spoke on research to find a blocking compound against HIF- hypoxia inducible factor, as a cure for some cancers. Gregg’s work was described in our blog on the Nobel prize being awarded to scientists working on hypoxia. HIF deserves its own blogpost! More about cancer and hypoxia at altitude from the Chronic Hypoxia Conference in La Páz.
I was selected to give my presentation, “Colorado Kids Are Smaller” to both conferences. I have been working on this for 20 years. You can read more on our blog where it is titled “Mountain Kids Are Smaller”. My goal is to get a unique growth chart for children under age two at altitude, to save parents and providers anxiety and money trying to get our kids to “be the same” as those at sea level.
The most useful tidbit of information came on the bus ride back to Calgary. Dr Heimo Mairbaurl, PhD shared that a quarter dose of acetazolamide was sufficient for his acute mountain sickness symptom prevention, 62 mg for a guy over 6 feet tall. Although there was a study on a new possible preventive treatment, prochlorperazine, done on Mount Blue Sky last fall, I still swear by the old drug formerly known as “Diamox”.
