Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
It has been reported in scuba divers, [4] [5] apnea (breath hold) free-diving competitors, [6] combat swimmers, and triathletes. [2] [7] The causes are incompletely understood as of 2010. [2] [8] [9] Some authors believe that SIPE may be the leading cause of death among recreational scuba divers, but there is insufficient evidence at present. [3]
Diving disorders are medical conditions specifically arising from underwater diving. The signs and symptoms of these may present during a dive, on surfacing, or up to several hours after a dive. The principal conditions are decompression illness (which covers decompression sickness and arterial gas embolism ), nitrogen narcosis , high pressure ...
This is because scuba diving is considered an elective and "high-risk" activity and treatment for decompression sickness is expensive. A typical stay in a recompression chamber will easily cost several thousand dollars, even before emergency transportation is included.
Divers face specific physical and health risks when they go underwater with scuba or other diving equipment, or use high pressure breathing gas.Some of these factors also affect people who work in raised pressure environments out of water, for example in caissons.
Freediving blackout, breath-hold blackout, [1] or apnea blackout is a class of hypoxic blackout, a loss of consciousness caused by cerebral hypoxia towards the end of a breath-hold (freedive or dynamic apnea) dive, when the swimmer does not necessarily experience an urgent need to breathe and has no other obvious medical condition that might have caused it.
SIPE usually occurs during heavy exertion in conditions of water immersion, such as swimming and diving. It has been reported in scuba divers, [15] [16] apnea (breath hold) free-diving competitors, [17] [18] combat swimmers, [19] [20] and triathletes. [14] The causes are incompletely understood at the present time. [14] [21] [22]
Blackout can occur during ascent from a deep freedive or immediately after surfacing. This is due to a relatively rapidly lowered oxygen partial pressure caused by a reduction in ambient pressure after much of the available arterial oxygen has been used up at the higher partial pressures induced by depth, leaving the diver in a state of latent hypoxia, with actual cerebral hypoxia inevitable ...
Breath-hold victims typically black out close to the surface, sometimes even as they break surface, and have been seen to approach the surface without apparent distress only to sink away. Breath-hold victims are usually established practitioners of deep breath-hold diving, are fit, strong swimmers and have not experienced problems before.