Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 05/07/2020 19:40:36
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Maybe this post will be another example of how dumb I am, but... I was watching a movie and there's a scene where two men are trapped in a vault and one of them quickly struggles to breathe. The second man suggests that because he is a smoker, he cannot handle the lower oxygen levels. I would assume that smokers have better tolerance to low oxygen levels than non-smokers, no?
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It depends how long it is since he last smoked.
Smoking clutters up the blood with CO and that will reduce tolerance to oxygen depletion until the CO is cleared out.
Completely clearing it takes a day or so.
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Against that, and as suggested by COVID cases, some people seem to adapt to low oxygen availability, either through living with chronic disease or at high altitude, and thus may fare better when their intake is further restricted.
That said, the men in a vault will be more affected by rising CO2 than falling O2 levels. CO2 is tolerable (and even necessary) at levels below 0.5% but fatal above 5% concentration, whilst O2 falling from 20% to 15% (equivalent to around 10,000 ft altitude) is tolerable and even at 10% may be survivable.
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Thanks for the reply. But if someone is a true, old school tobacco smoker they're lungs will have tolerance for low oxygen due to them slightly blocking your air tubes, right?. I'm a lowly historian, not a physician, so perhaps my opinions are invalid, I don't know. (But I think I can point out that the film takes place in Vatican City, which flatly bans smoking. How he manages to do that without getting a pike shoved up his ass courtesy of la guardia svizzera pontificia is mind boggling).
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Long terms smokers have chronic oxygen deprivation.
That's one of the things that kills them; hardly "tolerance".
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Long terms smokers have chronic oxygen deprivation.
Oxygen deprivation impairs rational thought. Chicken or egg?