[HN Gopher] The Unending Allure of High Mountains
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       The Unending Allure of High Mountains
        
       Author : Thevet
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2024-06-16 16:50 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
        
       | cactusplant7374 wrote:
       | I read some studies a few years ago that suggest going that high
       | can cause brain damage. Does anyone know the state of the
       | research?
        
         | rnewme wrote:
         | Old old news, research was conclusive decades ago. Going that
         | high does indeed cause irreparable brain damage.
        
         | bumbledraven wrote:
         | A 2023 meta-analysis
         | (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36982007/) concluded that "as
         | a short-term plateau exercise, high-altitude mountaineering has
         | no significant negative impacts on the cognitive functions of
         | climbers."
         | 
         | As context for anyone unfamiliar with the issue, below are some
         | quotes from a 2008 SciAm article discussing a research paper by
         | Fayed et al titled "Evidence of brain damage after high-
         | altitude climbing by means of magnetic resonance imaging"
         | (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16443427/).
         | 
         | https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-cells-into-...
         | (emphasis added):
         | 
         | > ... one of the sobering things about the Fayed study is that
         | _even when climbers showed no signs of acute sickness, the
         | scans still found brain damage_.
         | 
         | > The results in the Everest climbers were the starkest... The
         | expedition had no major mishaps, and none of the 12
         | professional climbers evinced any obvious signs of high-
         | altitude illness; the only acute case of mountain sickness was
         | a mild one in the expedition's amateur climber. Yet _only one
         | of the 13 climbers (a professional) returned with a normal
         | brain scan_. All the scans of the other 12 showed cortical
         | atrophy or enlargement of the Virchow-Robin (VR) spaces. These
         | spaces surround the blood vessels that drain brain fluid and
         | communicate with the lymph system; _widening of these VR spaces
         | is seen in the elderly but rarely in the young_.
         | 
         | > The body is remarkably resilient: Does the brain recover from
         | these mountaineering wounds? To answer this question, the
         | _researchers reexamined the same climbers three years after the
         | expedition, with no other high-altitude climbing intervening.
         | In all cases, the damage was still apparent on the second set
         | of scans_.
        
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