High altitude therapy for heart patients

OCTOBER 5, 2010.
Treating Heart Patients With Thin Air
High-Altitude Regimen Favored by Endurance Athletes Shows Promise in Study.

By AMY DOCKSER MARCUS
Heart-failure researchers are testing a provocative hypothesis: whether a technique used by elite athletes to improve endurance can help some of medicine's sickest patients improve their ability to exercise and function in their daily lives.

The technique simulates high-altitude training in which cyclists and other endurance-sport athletes sleep in sealed tents where oxygen levels mimic the thin air at mountain elevations in a bid to improve their performance at normal heights. Now a pilot study is under way to see if thin air is a boon to heart-failure patients as well.

.The idea may seem counter-intuitive. A common symptom of heart failure, a chronic weakening of the heart muscle that compromises its ability to pump blood, is shortness of breath. Patients often have difficulty climbing a flight of stairs or walking a block or two.

But Simon Maybaum, medical director of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Advanced Cardiac Therapy in the Bronx, N.Y., says the problem in heart failure isn't a lack of oxygen, but poor blood flow. He thinks the physiological changes athletes gain from a "sleep-high" strategy can help improve the ability of heart-failure patients to get more oxygen to body tissue and gain endurance as a result.

"The same changes that occur in an athlete should also benefit people who have cardiac dysfunction," Dr. Maybaum says.


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Once you go up you can come back down, but also, if you lived your life up at altitude and you go down to sea-level-ish (say 2000 ft) and try to go back up, you're dead. So we here down below can go up and back but them up above can't come down here and go back. And there's the tales of heaven and earth and also hell.

Quote
Vince
... but also, if you lived your life up at altitude and you go down to sea-level-ish (say 2000 ft) and try to go back up, you're dead. So ... but them up above can't come down here and go back.

Reference?

Eye keeps tellinz da old dude 2 get a hyperbomic chamber.

Maybe this will convince him.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/06/2010 09:40AM by chick-on.