When Glen Foster travels to the Himalayas next week he will be combining two of his greatest passions: mountaineering and medicine.
The post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia is joining 24 other researchers as they travel to the Pyramid Laboratory at the base of Mount Everest. There, the group will study the effects of chronic oxygen deprivation on the heart, lungs and brain in an effort to better understand the links to diseases like sleep apnea, heart attacks and stroke.
"By going to high altitudes, where oxygen decreases, we are able to study how healthy people adapt to low oxygen and see if any insights can be gained from that," he said. "That can help us understand new treatments or paths of physiology."
The Pyramid Laboratory is located 300 m below the Mount Everest base camp at an altitude of roughly 5,000 m above sea level.
And the back-country environment is nothing new for Foster.
For the last several years, he has volunteered with Coquitlam Search and Rescue, participating in numerous training exercises and searches in the mountains along the northern edge of the Tri-Cities. While Foster believes the SAR experience will help him, he said he expects to learn a lot in the rugged mountains of Nepal.
"It is a different world over there," he said. "I would like to think my experience here will carry over there. Definitely I will be out of my comfort level a bit."
Getting to a remote lab 5 km above sea level with all the necessary research equipment and personal belongings is no easy task. Porters will help the team carry 15 large oxygen cylinders, each weighing about 100 lb., along with power generators and adapters. Getting from Kathmandu to the Pyramid Laboratory is expected to take close to eight days.
Once in the mountains, they will spend three weeks conducting eight experiments as part of the study titled "Integrative physiological adaptation to high-altitude: a scientific expedition to explore mechanisms of human adaptation."
Team members will also test several permanent residents of the mountainous Pheriche region of Nepal, which sits 4,200 m above sea level.
"People who live their lives at high altitude seem more resistant and less vulnerable to the respiratory and cardiovascular problems that we experience living at sea level," said Philip Ainslie, principal investigator and associate professor at the School of Health and Exercise Sciences. "We want to explore this phenomenon further to gain insight into those differences.
He added that the conditions at the base of Everest are ideal for the kind of research his team will be conducting.
Foster, Ainslie and the rest of the team have been in Kelowna for the last several weeks preparing for the trip. Baseline testing is being conducted for later comparison with results of similar tests done at the Pyramid Laboratory.
Part of the funding for the expedition comes from the sale of a limited-edition patch through UBC's Okanagan campus bookstore. Organizers also hope to raise funds for the Himalaya Trust, an organization that funds schools, health care and other facilities in the region.
