The human body is roughly 60 percent water, so it cannot be understated how critical water. Healthy lungs keep the blood oxygenated at a level between 95 and 100%—if it dips below 92%, it’s a cause for concern and a doctor might decide to intervene with supplemental oxygen. Normal oxygen saturation levels are 97%–100%, although many patients that require oxygen at home may be at a lower baseline, ranging from 88%–96%. If you do not have a portable finger pulse oximeter in your home, you can also learn how to assess signs and symptoms of low oxygen levels. How Does Sleep Apnea Oxygen Level Affect the Body? Any value of blood oxygen level bellow 92% is abnormal. However, the number of desaturations and the time spent with abnormal oxygen levels is important. For example, if you only desaturated below 92% once or twice during a 7 hour sleep, and the desaturation level lasted only a couple of seconds, it's not a reason for worry. Exercise frequently. Unfortunately, many people lead a sedentary lifestyle nowadays, which means.
A member of the medical staff treats a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center on July 2, 2020 in Houston, Texas. (Credit: Go Nakamura/Getty Images)
Researchers have begun to solve one of COVID-19’s biggest and most life-threatening mysteries: how the virus causes “silent hypoxia,” a condition where oxygen levels in the body are abnormally low.
Those low oxygen levels can can irreparably damage vital organs if gone undetected for too long.
More than six months since COVID-19 began spreading in the US, scientists are still solving the many puzzling aspects of how the novel coronavirus attacks the lungs and other parts of the body.
Despite experiencing dangerously low levels of oxygen, many people infected with severe cases of COVID-19 sometimes show no symptoms of shortness of breath or difficulty breathing.
Hypoxia’s ability to quietly inflict damage is why health experts call it “silent.” In coronavirus patients, researchers think the infection first damages the lungs, rendering parts of them incapable of functioning properly. Those tissues lose oxygen and stop working, no longer infusing the blood stream with oxygen, causing silent hypoxia. But exactly how that domino effect occurs has not been clear until now.
Instrument To Measure Oxygen Level In Body
“We didn’t know [how this] was physiologically possible,” says Bela Suki, professor of biomedical engineering and of materials science and engineering at Boston University and one of the coauthors of the study in Nature Communications.
Some coronavirus patients have experienced what some experts have described as levels of blood oxygen that are “incompatible with life.” Disturbingly, Suki says that many of these patients showed little to no signs of abnormalities when they underwent lung scans.
Correct Oxygen Level In Body
To help get to the bottom of what causes silent hypoxia, biomedical engineers used computer modeling to test out three different scenarios that help explain how and why the lungs stop providing oxygen to the bloodstream.
They found that silent hypoxia is likely caused by a combination of biological mechanisms that may occur simultaneously in the lungs of COVID-19 patients, says lead author Jacob Herrmann, a biomedical engineer and research postdoctoral associate in Suki’s lab.
How healthy lungs work
Normally, the lungs perform the life-sustaining duty of gas exchange, providing oxygen to every cell in the body as we breathe in and ridding us of carbon dioxide each time we exhale.
Healthy lungs keep the blood oxygenated at a level between 95 and 100%—if it dips below 92%, it’s a cause for concern and a doctor might decide to intervene with supplemental oxygen. (Early in the coronavirus pandemic, when clinicians first started sounding the alarm about silent hypoxia, oximeters flew off the shelves as many people, worried that they or their family members might have to recover from milder cases of coronavirus at home, wanted to be able to monitor their blood oxygen levels.)
The researchers first looked at how COVID-19 affects the lungs’ ability to regulate where blood is directed. Normally, if areas of the lung aren’t gathering much oxygen due to damage from infection, the blood vessels will constrict in those areas. This is actually a good thing that our lungs have evolved to do, because it forces blood to instead flow through lung tissue replete with oxygen, which is then circulated throughout the rest of the body.
But Herrmann says preliminary clinical data has suggested that the lungs of some COVID-19 patients had lost the ability of restricting blood flow to already damaged tissue and, in contrast, were potentially opening up those blood vessels even more—something that is hard to see or measure on a CT scan.
Using a computational lung model, Herrmann, Suki, and their team tested that theory, revealing that for blood oxygen levels to drop to the levels observed in COVID-19 patients, blood flow would indeed have to be much higher than normal in areas of the lungs that can no longer gather oxygen—contributing to low levels of oxygen throughout the entire body, they say.
Next, they looked at how blood clotting may affect blood flow in different regions of the lung. When the lining of blood vessels get inflamed from COVID-19 infection, tiny blood clots too small to be seen on medical scans can form inside the lungs. They found, using computer modeling of the lungs, that this could incite silent hypoxia, but alone it is likely not enough to cause oxygen levels to drop as low as the levels seen in patient data.
Silent hypoxia hides in lungs
Last, the researchers used their computer model to find out if COVID-19 interferes with the normal ratio of air-to-blood flow that the lungs need to function normally.
This type of mismatched air-to-blood flow ratio is something that happens in many respiratory illnesses such as with asthma patients, Suki says, and it can be a possible contributor to the severe, silent hypoxia that has been observed in COVID-19 patients.
The models suggest that for this to be a cause of silent hypoxia, the mismatch must be happening in parts of the lung that don’t appear injured or abnormal on lung scans.
Altogether, the findings suggest that a combination of all three factors are likely to be responsible for the severe cases of low oxygen in some COVID-19 patients.
By having a better understanding of these underlying mechanisms, and how the combinations could vary from patient to patient, clinicians can make more informed choices about treating patients using measures like ventilation and supplemental oxygen.
Researchers are currently studying a number of interventions, including a low-tech intervention called prone positioning that flips patients over onto their stomachs, allowing for the back part of the lungs to pull in more oxygen and evening out the mismatched air-to-blood ratio.
“Different people respond to this virus so differently,” Suki says. For clinicians, he says it’s critical to understand all the possible reasons why a patient’s blood oxygen might be low, so that they can decide on the proper form of treatment, including medications that could help constrict blood vessels, bust blood clots, or correct a mismatched air-to-blood flow ratio.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute supported the work.
Source: Boston University
What Is A Normal Oxygen Level
5 Tips to Increase your Blood Oxygen Naturally
For those suffering from low blood oxygen levels due to lung disease, every little bit counts. Increasing one’s oxygen intake any way possible seems like a good idea. If your blood oxygen level is low and you’re finding it difficult to breathe, try these five tactics for increasing the amount of oxygen your body absorbs:
- When the weather allows, open your windows. Access to fresh air is essential for breathing more easily. However, remember it’s important to monitor your local air quality. If you live in an urban area and can’t open the place up because of smog, consider investing in an indoor air filtration system, or items which purify air at home naturally. But Choose electronic air purifiers carefully—many of them produce lung-irritating ozone.
- Grow green things. Introducing live plants into your home will increase available indoor oxygen. Ferns are a great option for extra oxygen production in the home. They are relatively easy to keep alive and don’t require a lot of sunshine.
- Exercise. Check with your doctor about the type and amount of exercise you should be doing each day. As your breathing rate and depth increases, your lungs absorb more oxygen, and that means you’ll feel better.
- Practice mindfulness. Begin a daily meditation or prayer routine that emphasizes deep breathing. Five to ten minutes per day of relaxed and focused breathing can improve your oxygen intake and reduce stress.
- Eat fresh, iron-rich foods. Your diet can, to some extent, influence your blood’s ability to absorb oxygen. Certain foods can help improve your oxygen levels in the blood. Focus on iron-rich foods such as meat, poultry, fish, legumes and green leafy vegetables. These dietary choices can correct an iron deficiency, which could increase your body’s ability to process oxygen and make you feel more energetic. Stock up on green vegetables like kale, broccoli and celery.
Mac os mojave download for virtualbox. If you or a loved one suffers from chronic lung disease, contact the Lung Health Institute at 888-745-6697 to speak with a patient coordinator about improving your quality of life.