HACE can be fatal, but generally the main danger of HACE is that it can lead to a fatal accident during mountain climbing, hiking, or skiing, because the person loses her judgment, kind of like being drunk. The physician also may check the retinas of your eyes with a technique called ophthalmoscopy, which can help show what is happening in the blood vessels of the brain. One such complication is called High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) the mini-mental status test helps physicians determine whether you have HACE. If you have a high Lake Louise score, you also will be tested for signs of two serious altitude complications, corresponding to to the severe end of the spectrum of altitude illness. The values will be added together, resulting in what is called the “Lake Louise score” for severity of altitude sickness. Based on whether you report each of these sets of symptoms as “not present”, “mild”, “moderate”, or “severe”, physicians assign a value based on a point system that ranges from 0 to 3. Slightly worse cases of the also include other symptoms that doctors will use to diagnose you, such as gastrointestinal symptoms, insomnia, fatigue, and dizziness or lightheadedness. The most mild form of altitude sickness develops with just a headache.
Even so, to check a patient for chronic altitude sickness, physicians also typically order blood tests and more specialized tests of the lungs. The physical examination also may include what’s called a mini-mental status test.įor most pregnant women, acute altitude sickness is the more relevant category of altitude sickness, since it is related to traveling to high altitude rapidly. These tests can help to rule out other conditions that can appear like altitude sickness. This means that physicians make the diagnosis based on your history and findings on the physical examination, although physicians also may require some common tests, such as a chest X-ray and a sputum sample analysis. A very different category of altitude sickness is chronic altitude sickness, which can affect the blood, lungs, and brain of people who live at high altitude over long periods of time.Īltitude sickness is a clinical diagnosis. The symptoms of acute altitude sickness range in severity from a simple headache, to multiple symptoms, such as weakness, fatigue, dizziness or lightheadedness, insomnia, and gastrointestinal symptoms, to severe, life-threatening swelling (edema) in the brain and lungs. The typical scenario for this is a woman going skiing during early pregnancy, when there are no particular restrictions on activity, or a woman who travels later in pregnancy, not to ski, but to accompany others on a vacationĪltitude sickness is classified as “acute” if it develops quickly (within hours to days), due to a rapid ascent to high altitude.
This means that, if you are pregnant, you have a fairly high chance of developing altitude sickness if you ascend too quickly to high altitude, such as over the course of hours to one day.
However, young adults are more susceptible to acute mountain sickness compared with people over the age of 50 years. Pregnant women are not more likely than others to develop acute mountain sickness. It climbs to 85% for people flying directly to Mount Everest. For travelers at Colorado ski locations, for instance, the rate of altitude sickness is 25%, but the rate jumps to 50% for those arriving at the Himalayan mountains. It could happen if you are in an inadequately pressurized aircraft, but usually it is the result of ascending to mountain locations, without giving your body adequate time to acclimate (adapt) to the higher altitude.Īcute mountain sickness develops in 25% to 85% of people who travel to high altitude, but the percentage depends on the altitude of the starting location and on the site of arrival.
This generally means more than 2,500 m (8,202 ft). Altitude sickness is a set of symptoms that range from mild to life-threatening and that develop as a result of a person being exposed to lower than normal pressures of atmospheric oxygen (O 2), during and after ascent to high altitude.