On 23 May 2007 at the summit of Mount Everest, a small team of exhausted Southampton doctors and scientists drew blood samples from their own femoral arteries, sparking a decade of ground-breaking discoveries of how low oxygen levels affect the body.
Ten years on, this pioneering endeavour has enhanced our understanding of life-threatening trauma and critical illness, how humans adapt to life at high altitude and led to new approaches to intensive care.
One in five people in the UK end up in intensive care at some point and, of those, 25-30 per cent die, with lack of oxygen, or hypoxia, a major contributory factor.
Reducing those deaths has been the main aim of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest, an international collaboration between the University of Southampton, University College London and Duke University in the USA, by using the oxygen-thin air of the Himalayas to simulate hypoxia.
Some of the most prominent results, radically changing research into how oxygen is used to support critically ill patients, are based on arterial blood samples taken by the 2007 team from themselves, just after reaching the summit and fighting their own dangerous hypoxia.
Professor Mike Grocott, Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Medicine at the University and Consultant in Critical Care Medicine at University Hospital Southampton who leads the Xtreme Everest collaboration said:
The past 10 years of work have greatly advanced our understanding of low-oxygen effects, physiological adaptation and targets for better oxygen therapy.
We have been extremely fortunate to work with a team of dedicated researchers and volunteers, including the Sherpa community in Nepal, and without them the expeditions would not have taken place.
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