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You are missing the fact that the human lungs are something like twice as effective and powerful as the "need" to be at sea level, and have plenty of room to ha

You are missing the fact that the human lungs are something like twice as effective and powerful as the "need" to be at sea level, and have plenty of room to handle less oxygen in the air. Second, the human body adapts quite well to living at higher altitudes, because it will compensate for the lower oxygen levels. Same blood oxygen level as a sea level human means same quantity of oxygen getting to the brain. >Even if oxygen levels are identical once you get to the blood stream, it can cause many changes further up the process. What mechanism could possibly cause this? The brain is getting all the oxygen it needs.

kulahan 3y ago
>What mechanism could possibly cause this? The brain is getting all the oxygen it needs. I have no idea, but I was unaware this could only be caused by oxygen failing to reach the brain.
nullc 3y ago
> missing the fact that the human lungs are something like twice as effective and powerful as the "need" to be at sea level on average, but you can get a population effect from "some small portion of the population has smaller or disease compromised lungs or just sleep apnea, and THOSE people commit suicide at a higher rate at high altitude". The "our lungs are big enough" only works if you control for the cases where they aren't. I'd hoped that things like genetic screening would uncover that some cases where studies showing that eating/avoiding Foo has a small positive or negative effect turns out to actually be an enormous effect in a small sub-population... but so far we don't appear to have identified too many of those.