Hunting for answers

Photo: UBC Okanagan

UBC Professor Phil Ainslie’s research has taken him from extreme mountain peaks, to the wild edges of the globe and to the cold depths of the ocean. His quest is to understand why and how some thrive in conditions that make the average person extremely ill.

Ainslie has spent his career studying hypoxia—reductions in oxygen tension.

He found that when the brain and other organs are deprived of oxygen or blood, a person may become ill, suffer permanent damage or even die.

“So far this phenomenon has been poorly investigated in high-altitude human populations such as Nepal’s famous Sherpa, and to an even lesser extent in unique populations of free-hold divers,” he said.

“Some of the free divers we’ve studied can hold their breath a remarkable 25 minutes. And they willingly put themselves in the most severe state of hypoxia for either spear-fishing or breath-holding competitions.”

Ainslie’s team worked with some of the world’s best free divers based in the Mediterranean and explored how their lungs, hearts and brains respond to extreme reductions in oxygen tension, and how they were able to train their bodies to withstand such pressures.   

“This kind of research is not only important to the ‘elite’ breath-hold divers, but also for people who live with progressive lung issues from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD--which includes emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and several strains of asthma), heart failure or people who go into intensive care,” Ainslie says.

“This research is important for any groups who have changes in blood flow that affect the delivery of oxygen to various organs as these affect their pathology, their quality of life and their doctor’s ability to treat them,” he added. 

Ainslie's says his goal is to understand how some populations can adapt (or maladapt) to their natural habitat, with the aim of coming up with new methods for prevention and treatment of such illnesses.