How to Overcome Altitude Sickness The U.S. military has made new discoveries

As the U.S. "Star-Spangled Banner" website reported on October 24, as the United States has seen in the past few decades, the U.S. Army sometimes has to fight in a hostile environment between the towering mountains.

To figure out what this will do to servicemen, who can better adapt to high-altitude operations, and how to protect them, 41 U.S. soldiers hiked and lived for days at an altitude of 3,600 meters this summer.

Dr. Beth Bedlerman, a physiologist at the U.S. Army Institute for Environmental Medicine and principal investigator of the project, said, "They [the Army] want to prevent it before the onset of the disease." ”

Bedlerman said in a recent interview: "The main purpose of this study is to test a new method in the Army called the 'Acute Altitude Sickness Early Warning Algorithm.'" ”

Preliminary findings show that in a randomly assigned group, half of the servicemen walked from the Ski Valley base (active ascent) to patrol huts at an altitude of 3600 meters, carrying a weight equivalent to 15% of their body weight, and the other half of the servicemen drove up the mountain (passive ascent).

Someone in both groups got sick. Each group of 11 people was affected by acute altitude sickness, which is caused by a state of hypoxia that rapidly reaches high altitudes, causing headaches, confusion, tiredness, vomiting and dizziness.

Bedlerman said: "We found that active ascent changed the course of acute altitude sickness. In the active ascending group, 8 of the 11 people were the most ill on the first day, and only 3 were unwell the next morning, and then the discomfort disappeared. ”

People in the passive ascending group who had acute altitude sickness were very uncomfortable throughout.

Bedlerman said: "We found that in the active ascending group, they developed the condition more quickly, but they would heal. ”

Soldiers on foot breathe more, urinate more, and physical activity "accelerates the process." "They got over it in two or three days [of acute altitude sickness]," she said. As a rule, acute altitude sickness is most severe after reaching high altitudes on the first day. ”

Bedlerman said: "This is the only data we have comprehensively analyzed so far. The remaining data are still being evaluated. ”