Dr. Artour Rakhimov: Do people notice that their breathing is heavy. In fact, normal person breaths about 15 liters per minute, he will not or she will not tell that her or his breathing is heavy, why? Because air is weightless and our breathing muscles chest and diaphragm, they are very strong. With maximum exercise, we can breathe up to 150 liters per minute, hence sick people breathe only about 10% of the maximum capacity, quite easy, just 10% of maximum capacity. So normally they will not notice. People usually tell that their breathing is heavy when it’s 25 liters per minute or even more. But in healthy, we should breathe only about 3%, 4% of our maximum capacity. In fact as you can see here, Hatha yoga people breathe almost nothing, just 1%, slightly more than 1% of maximum capacity, which is possible during physical exercise.
Now we get the paradox, how it is possible that sick people who breathe very heavy, they have little oxygen inside their body whereas healthy who breath little have much more oxygen? In order to understand this paradox, let us consider oxygen transfer. When we take inhale this volume of air, it is spread over our lungs. Our lung size is incredible, it’s about half size of the tennis court and it split in very, very thin layer. So you can imagine there is very efficient oxygen exchange between guts in our lungs and blood. Our blood after this process is about 98% saturated with oxygen, almost completely. So by heavy breathing, we can’t get much more but there is one gas that we remove during breathing, the gas is CO2, carbon dioxide.
Now what people think about CO2, what is it? Do we need it? What ordinary people tell is that CO2 is toxic, very poisonous gas. I spoke with hundreds, thousands of people during class test or just ordinary conversations and they found that people believe that CO2 is not necessary for them, whereas medical people have totally opposite opinion. They know that if CO2 drops in our body, about four times below the normal, below the medical normal, we are going to die in minutes. Medical people when we ask, how should we breathe at rest, they give the opposite answer. They tell, we have to breathe very little.
What is going to happen with a person who tries to do hundred fast and big breathe in succession, heavy breathing for about one minute, the person is going to pass out to faint, why? Because of lack of oxygen in the brain. Let us look at breath experiment. This is a difficult side than the other side, this is supposed to get the same result. In this we have normal breathing. This is the oxygen content in our brain. It is human head in colors. We have violet colors, blue colors, which indicate low oxygenation. On the right side, we have yellow and red in the rainbow, and these yellow and red colors indicate high oxygenation.
Now after one minute of hyperventilation, this is what is going on with our brain. It exactly found 40% reduction in oxygen level of our brain, just after one minute of hyperventilation. But if a sick person breathes, not this heavy, but let’s say, 15 or 25 liters per minute, of course he would be somewhere in between, he will be already deficient in oxygen inside the brain. So who does it place? In order to understand it, we have to understand another thing. CO2 is exceptionally important for duration of blood vessels. What happens when CO2 is normal, they awake and when it hyperventilate, they get constricted. So here we arrive was a constrictive effect, meaning that lower the level of CO2, they call it hypocapnia, carbon dioxide deficiency. This is the main cause.
Cerebral blood flow decreases 2% for every millimeters of mercury decrease in CO2. Professor Newton, University of Southern California Medical Center, Hyperventilation Syndrome. 2004.
So what is a Bohr effect? This theological law was discovered about 100 years and now it can be found literally in all medical and physiological text books. During the first year, they need to know basic laws very well. Imagine that I exercise with my muscles but my blood level is everywhere. The question is how does my blood know that oxygen might be released exactly at this site. So we can think about other parameters. When I exercise, I burn carbohydrates. When I burn carbohydrates, there are two end products, water and CO2. Water does not -- chemical reaction but CO2 does. What happens, CO2 diffuses into blood and then CO2 mix with hemoglobin or red blood cells, which carry oxygen. So CO2 comes to them and basically helps to release or punch out oxygen so that oxygen can diffuse into the tissue so that we can continue with our exercise, while carbon dioxide is partially combined with our blood so that we can expel it out.
Now we can think also of another situation. What happens when we hyperventilate? When we hyperventilate, CO2 is avoided, it can be 20, 30, or may be even 40% below the normal. Then our blood arrives at the same tissue but there isn’t enough CO2, so oxygen would not be released effectively as it should be, so normally when people hyperventilate. Now think about people with heart problems, diabetes, chronic fatigue, sleeping problems, many other, constipation, they would complain about fatigue, pink side, why? Because oxygen is not released when it is required, their breathing is too heavy. Not only muscles but all vital organs, brain, heart, kidneys, liver, large colon, small colon, they are all going to get less oxygen.
CO2 is the factor of stability of our nerve system. What happens, nerve cells, they have certain threshold when we receive a signal from outside. The signal is going to be transmitted only if it is strong enough. So when we get the message, a real signal is transmitted. But when we hyperventilate, this threshold can get very, very low and what happens? Any small abnormality disturbance which cannot be inside our nerve system can create a big response so that all of a sudden any part of the nerve system can start to discharge. Because of that CO2 is called tranquilizers and sedatives of brain. It makes us calm, reasonable, sensible.
This is what Dr. Brown wrote more than 50 years ago about CO2. He analyzed more than 300 western publications. Studies designed to determine the effects produced by hyperventilation on nerve and muscle have been consistent in their finding on increased irritability. Dr. Brown, Physiological effects of hyperventilation, Physiological Reviews 1953. There are recently dozens of studies who found the same result. Now there are more recent studies. Hence we can get here a very nice phrase which really describes what heavy breathing does to our brain. Hyperventilation leads to spontaneous and asynchronous firing of cortical neurons. Published in the Experimental Brain Research 1999.
So they say of all spontaneous and asynchronous firing, what does it mean? It means all of a sudden, any part of our neuron machinery can start to send signals without any relation to the reality. This means we can get talking in our head from nowhere, just because of heavy breathing. Hence we can imagine that this is a reason why people can get panic attacks, sleeping problems. What is going on with those who can not fall asleep? There are thoughts all of a sudden appearing and the person can not control that. Now what about depression, people who are violent and who have different phobias, addictions? Hence we can expect and it is true that this is known for more than 50 years in neurology, psychology, psychiatry, this literally all problems related to the sciences. Hyperventilation is necessary, why? Because when we breathe heavy, first of all we get less blood supply, CO2 is vasodilator and we know this fact now. We get the suppressed Bohr effect, so oxygenation of the brain further reduces. In addition to that, we have a huge destabilizing factor which makes the whole nerves machinery abnormal so that all of a sudden in some elliptical surface of our brain, we can have spontaneous and asynchronous firing, and appearing all of a sudden.
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