The researchers reports in the New England Journal of Medicine say that some people are sensitive to low barometric pressure in commercial aircraft. Very low barometric pressure are rare in modern aircraft, but the air pressure at sea level is not the norm. Some passengers who traveled on commercial flights along the experience feeling a disease similar to climbers who experience altitude sickness.
Feelings of weakness, with headache, nausea, confusion, fuzzy thinking, leg cramps, swollen hands and feet, dry scratchy throat, and sleep disturbances seem to be the group of symptoms that passengers flying about 6,500 feet . Also alarming symptoms such as blood clots are experiencing more and more of the leaflets long flight.
Apart from the low barometric pressure, some of the symptoms can also be attributed to prolonged sitting, the cabin air foul, fatigue, dehydration and even jet lag. One theory is that stronger person is low oxygen levels in the blood, which would be indicative of low barometric pressure cabin.
Low oxygen levels have been shown in an alarming number of serious and chronic diseases. Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1935 for showing that cancer cells thrive in low oxygen environments. Moreover, cells that are directly adjacent to the capillaries, which are tiny blood vessels that carry fuel and oxygen to cells, tissues and organs rely totally of oxygen available to work. At altitudes above 6000 feet, become oxygen starvation.
One of the effects of oxygen deprivation is the disruption of the fluid inside and outside the cell. In this state of starvation of oxygen, cells begin to absorb the liquid causing them to swell. This swelling squeezes capillaries, which are about the diameter of a red blood cell, and causes the inside diameter to become smaller. The result is that blood cells are less able to squeeze through the capillaries to feed the fuel cells and oxygen. This dynamic causes symptoms that can become more pronounced on long flights.
Not only that, the circulation slows down and becomes very inefficient, with low levels of oxygen. With very little body movement and low oxygen levels during long commercial flights, more people are experiencing deep vein thrombosis or blood clots in deep veins of the legs.
The NEJM study took 500 volunteers and created a simulation of flight of 20 hours to see how each volunteer responded to different altitudes. Any symptoms that occurred were recorded with the altitude where the symptoms occurred.
Volunteers travel from ground level to 8000 meters above sea level were found to have a decline of 4 percent oxygen in the blood. The severity of symptoms that might have to do with whether or not people were accustomed to fly at such high altitudes.
Seven percent of the volunteers expressed severe symptoms during the simulated flight. Other volunteers have experienced symptoms after three hours and a few others after about nine hours. People aged over 60 years of age he showed signs of far fewer people or younger were less likely to report them. The men were also less likely to report symptoms than women. In flight operation that was introduced to see if it reduced symptoms, was ineffective in reducing the discomfort.
People taking long commercial flights need to develop strategies for pre and post-flight that will reduce symptoms such as swollen hands and feet, headaches, tiredness and so on, in addition to reducing the risk of things like shortness of breath and deep vein thrombosis. Being pro-active, particularly for chronic flyers, good health can be maintained, the case of a sudden dangerous symptoms can be reduced or eliminated.
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