Luciano136 wrote:

sjarelkwint wrote:EDIT: The more I think about the IQ test the more interesting it gets .. The days you are at altitude you can test people ... You can try to arrange with the people to test them when they get back and aren't wasted (altitude + tired + ...) anymore in mendoza ...

I'm 100% positive it will lower IQ significantly but it would be interesting to see by how much.

Try to do some math when you get to 14k. Boy, is it ever tough. I remember on a few occasions trying to count how many hours and minutes it took me to get to the top and I have to seriously concentrate LOL

That has actually been studied.

Actually, I was only serious because I've been wondering about the affect of l-arginine for about 4 yrs.

Now if you want, you could also have as a secondary endpoint the affect of l-arginine on male/female (sheep, goat, llama,.....) relationships at altitude (which in theory should also be affected by vascular tone .

I can definitely recommend not trying the 'smokin' study. My own research in the same field a few years ago resulted in a bad experience. Having had a 'celebration' of reaching our goal on a rocky outcrop in the Glacier Du Tabuchet, La Meije, serious vertigo took over and I was irrationally scared stiff of the 100+meter cliff right next to me. Total freakout. There was no reasoning with me and I couldn't move for at least half an hour. 2 hours later and we were falling around the place laughing about it. Would my insurance have covered rescue costs in the event of a 'freakout'? Had nothing to do with altitude but it did with surroundings, so I'll be leaving that one alone for a long while.

On a serious note the asthma study would be very interesting to me as I'm a moderate/severe asthmatic. I never have any breathing problems in the great outdoors and I certainly coped up to 5,000metres much better than my girlfriend. Have also been around 4,000m plenty of times always breathing much better than I would in London, Delhi or Kathmandu, I guess pretty much any big city. Though I'd simply put that down to the purity of and lack of irritants in the air in mountain environments compared to normal. I've heard from plenty of other places that asthma can in fact be aggravated by altitude, the logic of which I don't understand. Can any SP doctors shed further light on the subject?

Of course if you do go for an asthma Aconcagua study then I want in!! At a push I could probably take part in a double study, rippers and asthma at altitude, if it got me to Aconcagua I'd do it.

barrys wrote:I can definitely recommend not trying the 'smokin' study. My own research in the same field a few years ago resulted in a bad experience. Having had a 'celebration' of reaching our goal on a rocky outcrop in the Glacier Du Tabuchet, La Meije, serious vertigo took over and I was irrationally scared stiff of the 100+meter cliff right next to me. Total freakout. There was no reasoning with me and I couldn't move for at least half an hour. 2 hours later and we were falling around the place laughing about it. Would my insurance have covered rescue costs in the event of a 'freakout'? Had nothing to do with altitude but it did with surroundings, so I'll be leaving that one alone for a long while.

On a serious note the asthma study would be very interesting to me as I'm a moderate/severe asthmatic. I never have any breathing problems in the great outdoors and I certainly coped up to 5,000metres much better than my girlfriend. Have also been around 4,000m plenty of times always breathing much better than I would in London, Delhi or Kathmandu, I guess pretty much any big city. Though I'd simply put that down to the purity of and lack of irritants in the air in mountain environments compared to normal. I've heard from plenty of other places that asthma can in fact be aggravated by altitude, the logic of which I don't understand. Can any SP doctors shed further light on the subject?

Of course if you do go for an asthma Aconcagua study then I want in!! At a push I could probably take part in a double study, rippers and asthma at altitude, if it got me to Aconcagua I'd do it.

You can be the control group...I'll do the bong hits. Somebody's gotta take one for the team.

Sean Kenney wrote:

barrys wrote:I can definitely recommend not trying the 'smokin' study. My own research in the same field a few years ago resulted in a bad experience. Having had a 'celebration' of reaching our goal on a rocky outcrop in the Glacier Du Tabuchet, La Meije, serious vertigo took over and I was irrationally scared stiff of the 100+meter cliff right next to me. Total freakout. There was no reasoning with me and I couldn't move for at least half an hour. 2 hours later and we were falling around the place laughing about it. Would my insurance have covered rescue costs in the event of a 'freakout'? Had nothing to do with altitude but it did with surroundings, so I'll be leaving that one alone for a long while.

On a serious note the asthma study would be very interesting to me as I'm a moderate/severe asthmatic. I never have any breathing problems in the great outdoors and I certainly coped up to 5,000metres much better than my girlfriend. Have also been around 4,000m plenty of times always breathing much better than I would in London, Delhi or Kathmandu, I guess pretty much any big city. Though I'd simply put that down to the purity of and lack of irritants in the air in mountain environments compared to normal. I've heard from plenty of other places that asthma can in fact be aggravated by altitude, the logic of which I don't understand. Can any SP doctors shed further light on the subject?

Of course if you do go for an asthma Aconcagua study then I want in!! At a push I could probably take part in a double study, rippers and asthma at altitude, if it got me to Aconcagua I'd do it.

You can be the control group...I'll do the bong hits. Somebody's gotta take one for the team.

I don't have asthma but maybe I should revisit my decision from several years ago to kick the habit if it gets me to Aconcagua...

CClaude wrote:

Luciano136 wrote:

sjarelkwint wrote:EDIT: The more I think about the IQ test the more interesting it gets .. The days you are at altitude you can test people ... You can try to arrange with the people to test them when they get back and aren't wasted (altitude + tired + ...) anymore in mendoza ...

I'm 100% positive it will lower IQ significantly but it would be interesting to see by how much.

Try to do some math when you get to 14k. Boy, is it ever tough. I remember on a few occasions trying to count how many hours and minutes it took me to get to the top and I have to seriously concentrate LOL

That has actually been studied.

Actually, I was only serious because I've been wondering about the affect of l-arginine for about 4 yrs.

Now if you want, you could also have as a secondary endpoint the affect of l-arginine on male/female (sheep, goat, llama,.....) relationships at altitude (which in theory should also be affected by vascular tone .

Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med., Volume 162, Number 1, July 2000, 221-224


Exhaled Nitric Oxide in High-Altitude Pulmonary Edema
Role in the Regulation of Pulmonary Vascular Tone and Evidence for a Role against Inflammation
HERVÉ DUPLAIN, CLAUDIO SARTORI, MATTIA LEPORI, MARC EGLI, YVES ALLEMANN, PASCAL NICOD, and URS SCHERRER

Department of Internal Medicine and the Botnar Center for Clinical Research, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne; and Department of Cardiology, Inselspital, Bern, Switzerland

High-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) is a life-threatening condition occurring in predisposed subjects at altitudes above 2,500 m. It is not clear whether, in addition to hemodynamic factors and defective alveolar fluid clearance, inflammation plays a pathogenic role in HAPE. We therefore made serial measurements of exhaled pulmonary nitric oxide (NO), a marker of airway inflammation, in 28 HAPE-prone and 24 control subjects during high-altitude exposure (4,559 m). To examine the relationship between pulmonary NO synthesis and pulmonary vascular tone, we also measured systolic pulmonary artery pressure (Ppa). In the 13 subjects who developed HAPE, exhaled NO did not show any tendency to increase during the development of lung edema. Throughout the entire sojourn at high altitude, pulmonary exhaled NO was roughly 30% lower in HAPE-prone than in control subjects, and there existed an inverse relationship between Ppa and exhaled NO (r = 0.51, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that HAPE is not preceded by airway inflammation. Reduced exhaled NO may be related to altered pulmonary NO synthesis and/or transport and clearance, and the data in our study could be consistent with the novel concept that in HAPE-prone subjects, a defect in pulmonary epithelial NO synthesis may contribute to exaggerated hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction and in turn to pulmonary edema

Circulation. 2002;106:826.)
© 2002 American Heart Association, Inc.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clinical Investigation and Reports


Positive Association of the Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase Gene Polymorphisms With High-Altitude Pulmonary Edema
Yunden Droma, MD; Masayuki Hanaoka, MD; Masao Ota, PhD; Yoshihiko Katsuyama, PhD; Tomonobu Koizumi, MD; Keisaku Fujimoto, MD; Toshio Kobayashi, MD; Keishi Kubo, MD
From the Departments of Medicine (Y.D., M.H., T. Koizumi, K.F., T. Kobayashi, K.K.), Legal Medicine (M.O.), and Pharmacy (Y.K.), Shinshu University School of Medicine, Matsumoto, Japan.

Correspondence to Masayuki Hanaoka, MD, First Department of Medicine, Shinshu University School of Medicine, 3-1-1 Asahi, Matsumoto 390-8621, Japan. E-mail masayuki@hsp.md.shinshu-u.ac.jp

Background— A defect of nitric oxide (NO) synthesis in the lung of high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) has been suggested to contribute to its exaggerated pulmonary hypertension. Several polymorphisms have been identified in the gene encoding endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), which is a key enzyme responsible for NO synthesis, some of which were reported to be associated with vascular disorders.

Methods and Results— We studied 41 HAPE-susceptible subjects (HAPE-s) and 51 healthy climbers (control group) in a Japanese population. We examined 2 polymorphisms of the eNOS gene, including the Glu298Asp variant and 27-base pair (bp) variable numbers of tandem repeats using polymerase chain reaction followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism. The Asp allelic frequency of the Glu298Asp variant was 25.6% in the HAPE-s and 9.8% in the controls, which was significantly different between the two groups (P=0.0044). The eNOS4a allelic frequency of 27-bp variable numbers of tandem repeats was 23.2% in the HAPE-s, significantly higher than that of 6.9% in the controls (P=0.0016). In HAPE-s group, 11 of 41 (26.8%) subjects possessed simultaneously both of the two significant alleles, but among the controls, none did, which showed a high statistical difference between the two groups (P=0.000059).

Conclusions— Both polymorphisms of the eNOS gene were significantly associated with HAPE. A genetic background may underlie the impaired NO synthesis in the pulmonary circulation of HAPE-s. These polymorphisms could be genetic markers for predicting the susceptibility to HAPE.

And the association of l-arginine and No synthase is from Prof John Cooke (Stanford University)

Cooke JP, Tsao PS. Arginine: a new therapy for atherosclerosis? Circulation 1997; 95: 311-312.

There was also a clinical trial in 2002 that pre-dates the VINTAGE MI trial showing an affect of arginine/NO and /AMI's published in Circulation which I'll get the reference for

J Am Coll Cardiol, 1998; 32:1336-1344
© 1998 by the American College of Cardiology Foundation



CLINICAL STUDIES
Restoring vascular nitric oxide formation by L-arginine improves the symptoms of intermittent claudication in patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease
Rainer H. Böger, MD*, Stefanie M. Bode-Böger, MD*, Wolfgang Thiele*, Andreas Creutzig, MD, Klaus Alexander, MD and J.ürgen C. Frölich, MD*

Whereas the contraindication for AMI patient populations is based on the VINTAGE MI clinical trial (2007)

and if you peruse the literature you'll also see the affect of NO/arginine on VEGF regulation

does weed make blood flow through the extemities? like the same way alcohol does? if so, it could be a emergency lightweight hobo heater if you were cold in camp or something.

kiwiw wrote:does weed make blood flow through the extemities? like the same way alcohol does? if so, it could be a emergency lightweight hobo heater if you were cold in camp or something.

I'm not a doctor. But I think when you are cold, your body reduces blood flow to extremities and skin in order to preserve the heat where it matters most, in the body's core. Something that defeats this process will simply transfer more heat from the body's core and allow it to be lost through the skin. This would not be a desirable effect for anything described as a heater.

If a drug warms you by increasing your metabolism or something, that might work, as long as your body has the energy to sustain that metabolism.

1) Let's try to keep this in general, not PnP.
2) Funding a study can't be that hard if you have a decent study.
3) My allergy seems to get better when I'm in cold dry places.

To get funding I'd imagine the energy drink idea, while of less scientific interest would make funding easier. So many companies looking for a new angle on marketing.........

one that would also be interesting and particularly relevant to high altitude would be the use of oxygenated or oxygenised water. Some studies support it's use for aiding exercise, others disprove it. Again, like energy drinks there are corporations involved who are always looking for a new selling point. But a study at altitude to me sounds far more decisive on it's effects than a bunch of people on exercise bikes in a University. You'd need alot of help to carry all that water though.


edit: ahem, sorry Wouter, now trying to keep it 'general'

Get one of those remote controlled choppers and see if it will fly up there in the thin air. If it does, attach a small video camera and get some summit shots from above!

barrys wrote:edit: ahem, sorry Wouter, now trying to keep it 'general'

I wasn't aiming at you, and sorry in general, just don't want this one to go to PnP. I'm still kind of hoping that we get a cool study out of this one. I remain pretty sure that marketing/money isn't too big of a problem.

Ow and viagra has been testen at altitude before - for it's positive sportive influences.