On Saturday 25 May a team of Southampton scientists and medical staff returned from Everest base camp where they have been taking on one of the harshest environments known to man to further vital research into the effects of low oxygen levels on the human body.
One in five people in the UK will end up in intensive care at some point in their life and of those, 40 per cent will die. Despite intensive care being one of the most sophisticated areas of hospital care, there is still limited understanding of why some people survive and some die.
Hypoxia (lack of oxygen reaching the body’s vital organs) takes place at high altitudes but is also a common problem for patients in an intensive care unit.
Mike Grocott, who also leads the Critical Care Research Area within the Southampton National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit and is Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Southampton, was joined on the Xtreme Everest project by Dr Denny Levett; research nurses Kay Mitchell and Karen Linford; Clinical Scientist Dr Sandy Jack and medical student Tom Smedley, all from University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust.
Xtreme Everest is a dedicated team of doctors, nurses and scientists who have been conducting investigations of human adaptation to hypoxia at high altitude, with the hope of developing novel treatments for critically ill patients suffering a similar challenge in hospital. The project is an international collaboration between the University of Southampton, University College London (London, UK) and Duke University (North Carolina, USA).
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