Hypoxia and Medicine

Oxygen saturation drops with exercise?

I've been dealing with a lot of breathing problems for several years. In some recent tests we've found that my oxygen saturation levels are dropping from a resting level of 98%-99% to 85% or lower with exercise. What are some things that could cause this? I do not have asthma, allergies, sleep apnea, a cardiac shunt, blood clots, vocal chord dysfunction, or any pulmonary function problems. I am in great shape. I'm a runner and cross country ski racer, I train an average of 13 hours a week. My blood pressure is low and my resting heartrate is around 53bmp My hemoglobin and hematocrit levels are 17gm/dl and 46%47%. I DO have severe acid reflux and a torn esophageal sphincter.

Public Comments

1. Reflux can damage the lungs over time. That can be mistaken for asthma and cause breathing problems. The best thing to do to talk to your doctor about how to control your reflux. Your lungs might then heal with time. Even though your blood looks good, your hemoglobin could be non-functional, like with anemia. Your doctor would be able to see on your blood test what kinds of hemoglobin you have. When oxygen saturation drops below 88% a patient is a candidate for oxygen. It is abnormal for oxygen saturation to dip significantly with activity in normal healthy people. This is beyond the scope of what I can take an educated guess on. I recommend that you get an exercise stress test. A pulmonary function lab would be able to determine when you desaturate and send the results on to a pulmonologist or cardiologist. I hope this has been of some help.
2. exercise-induced hypoxemia in extreme athletes : IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT EXERCISE may induce hypoxemia in highly trained endurance athletes (5, 7, 26, 28, 29), who are referred to as "extreme athletes" (2, 29). The mechanisms involved in the development of this exercise-induced hypoxemia (EIH) have long been debated, and two major explanations have been proposed: 1) a lack of compensatory hyperpnea (7, 16, 26) and/or 2) a gas exchange alteration that may result from functionally based mechanisms during exercise (16, 35). This latter may involve ventilation-perfusion (19, 33) and diffusion alterations induced by an incomplete O2 equilibrium between alveolar gas and pulmonary capillary blood as a result of a rapid red blood cell pulmonary transit time (7) and/or a pulmonary interstitial and peribronchial vascular edema during exhaustive exercise (9, 15, 16, 19, 29, 33, 35). A previous study (2) showed that the drop in arterial partial pressure of O2 (PaO2) during exhaustive exercise was associated with a concomitant increase in histamine release (%H) in extreme athletes, whereas there was no change in either PaO2 or histamine level in the untrained control group. Histamine is widely acknowledged to be an inflammatory mediator that causes increased microvascular permeability to macromolecules (38) and therefore increased transcapillary fluid movement. It has therefore been suggested that this increase in histamine release could be related to a change in pulmonary fluid movement and thus to a gas exchange alteration such as EIH (2, 30). The finding that EIH can be partly inhibited by prior inhalation of nedocromil sodium, a drug thought to act by inhibiting the release of histamine (30), provided evidence that this increase in histamine release during exercise may be involved in the development of EIH. More recently, it was reported that this increase in %H can be suppressed in association with an apparent change in ventilation-perfusion distribution (9). An interesting question concerns the origin of this increase in histamine release. Histamine is a well-known inflammatory mediator and potential contributor to mild hypoxemia (30, 38). The increase in histamine release associated with EIH may thus be the consequence of an inflammatory process in the lung and/or in the peripheral muscles (38) during incremental exercise. This increase may also be the consequence of an elevated basophil number and/or an elevated histamine content of these cells (1, 17, 24) in extreme athletes.
3. sometimes people do just run low on their O2 levels. do you have or have a family history of COPD, Emphysema, or any other lung disorders? that could be a cause. are you short of breath, dizzy, or feel sick to your stomach when your O2 levels drop?