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Decompression sickness (DCS; also called divers' disease, the bends, aerobullosis, and caisson disease) is a medical condition caused by dissolved gases emerging from solution as bubbles inside the body tissues during decompression.
Decompression sickness is usually avoidable by following the requirements of decompression tables or algorithms regarding ascent rates and stop times for the specific dive profile, but these do not guarantee safety, and in some cases, unpredictably, there will be decompression sickness.
Divers are exposed to raised partial pressures of oxygen in normal diving activities, where the partial pressure of oxygen in the breathing gas is increased in proportion to the ambient pressure at depth, and by using gas mixtures in which oxygen is substituted for inert gases to reduce decompression obligations, to accelerate decompression, or ...
The principal conditions are decompression illness (which covers decompression sickness and arterial gas embolism), nitrogen narcosis, high pressure nervous syndrome, oxygen toxicity, and pulmonary barotrauma (burst lung). Although some of these may occur in other settings, they are of particular concern during diving activities.
Decompression sickness is caused by inert gas bubble formation in supersaturated tissues, barotraumas of decompression are usually caused by rapid decompression where gas spaces are not able to equalise pressure with the surroundings, and ebullism occurs only in cases of decompression to very low ambient pressures.
1868 – Alfred Le Roy de Méricourt described decompression sickness as an occupational illness of sponge divers. [3] 1873 – Dr. Andrew Smith first used the terms "caisson disease" and "compressed air illness", describing 110 cases of decompression sickness as the physician in charge during construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Bubble decompression models are a rule based approach to calculating decompression based on the idea that microscopic bubble nuclei always exist in water and tissues that contain water and that by predicting and controlling the bubble growth, one can avoid decompression sickness. Most of the bubble models assume that bubbles will form during ...