(Daily News Scan - DNS English) What is Silent Hypoxia?
COVID-19 patients are being treated everywhere in each part of the world. A new kind of symptom have been reported in COVID-19 patients. This is termed as SILENT or Happy Hypoxia. This condition has puzzled the doctors, among which many of them are advocating its early detection that will avoid an illness called covid pneumonia.
Today’s edition of DNS will tell you about this new symptom called Silent Hypoxia.
Doctors have recently come across a worrying symptom Silent hypoxia in the patients. They have extremely low blood oxygen levels, in which they don’t feel breathlessness also.
Hypoxia is a condition wherein there is not enough oxygen available to the blood and body tissues. Hypoxia can be specific to a body part or to the whole body. A normal blood oxygen saturation level is more than 90% with 94 – 100 % considered is normal. If someone experiences lower than this then the brain might not receive the amount of oxygen it requires. This may lead to confusion and lethargy. Or if the level drops to as afar low as 80, then a danger signal arises because it may lead to organ damage or even death.
Now talking about silent hypoxia, it is a condition or a form of oxygen deprivation that is harder to detect than regular hypoxia. In this condition patients look less distress. Many patients despite having less level of oxygen of up to 80 percent also look fairly at ease and alert, according to multiple reports. This phenomenon has puzzled several medical practitioners. In many cases, Covid-19 patients with silent hypoxia did not exhibit symptoms such as shortness of breath or coughing until their oxygen fell to acutely low levels, at which point there was a risk of acute respiratory distress (ARDS) and organ failure.
As per a report, we don’t feel breathlessness even if we don’t get much of oxygen as we require. We feel breathlessness when we are unable to expel the carbon dioxide. This case was not appearing in patients of COVID-19. In the patients that have been suffering from COVID-19 pneumonia, the virus causes air sacs to fall, leading to a reduction in levels of oxygen. The lungs initially do not become stiff or heavy with fluid, and remain “compliant” — being able to expel carbon dioxide and avoiding its build-up. Thus, patients do not feel short of breath.
Silent hypoxia could be dangerous if the oxygen dos not gets carried to the all parts of the body or to some organs. People suffering with medical problems like heart disease, lung disease, or kidney disease might begin to experience difficulty due to low oxygen saturation.
If this is detected early enough, it can be treated with oxygen therapy. To prevent silent hypoxia, the lung damage caused by it has to be prevented first. However, an oxygen-monitoring device called a pulse oximeter can be helpful to detect low oxygen levels and alert people to seek early medical care. Pulse oximeters are the way forward when it comes to detecting and treating the coronavirus. The patients should also have pulse oximetry monitoring for two weeks, as this is the period during which COVID pneumonia typically develops.
