Measuring the ventilatory response to hypoxia.

After defining the current approach to measuring the hypoxic ventilatory response this paper explains why this method is not appropriate for comparisons between individuals or conditions, and does not adequately measure the parameters of the peripheral chemoreflex. A measurement regime is therefore proposed that incorporates three procedures. The first procedure measures the peripheral chemoreflex responsiveness to both hypoxia and CO(2) in terms of hypoxia's effects on the sensitivity and ventilatory recruitment threshold of the peripheral chemoreflex response to CO(2). The second and third procedures employ current methods for measuring the isocapnic and poikilocapnic ventilatory responses to hypoxia, respectively, over a period of 20 min. The isocapnic measure is used to determine the time course characteristics of hypoxic ventilatory decline and the poikilocapnic measure shows the ventilatory response to a hypoxic environment. A measurement regime incorporating these three procedures will permit a detailed assessment of the peripheral chemoreflex response to hypoxia that allows comparisons to be made between individuals and different physiological and environmental conditions.