High Altitude Pulmonary Edema
Climbing tall mountains can induce full lung hypoxia due to decreased atmospheric pressure. This hypoxia causes hypoxic vasoconstriction that ultimately leads to high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE). For this reason, most climbers carry supplemental oxygen to prevent hypoxia, edema, and HAPE. The standard drug treatment of dexamethasone does not alter the hypoxia or the consequent vasoconstriction, but stimulates fluid reabsorption in the lungs to reverse the edema.
Read more about this topic: Hypoxic Pulmonary Vasoconstriction
Famous quotes containing the words high and/or altitude:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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