Study shows how altitude lowers blood oxygen levels and increases heart rate during sleep
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Alcohol consumption during a flight, especially a long-haul flight, can be bad for your heart . The combination of sleep and high altitude already puts a strain on blood oxygen levels and heart rate, and alcohol also fatigues the cardiovascular system, even in healthy people.
A small study published in early June in Thorax (one of the respiratory medicine journals of the British Medical Journal) by scientists at the Institute of Aerospace Medicine of the German Aerospace Center shows this.
Researchers recruited healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 40: half slept in normal atmospheric conditions (at sea level) and the other half slept in a chamber simulating the pressurized conditions of an airplane cockpit at cruising altitude (2,438 meters above sea level.) ). In each group, half of the participants were asked to drink a moderate amount of alcohol (about two servings of alcohol) just before bedtime, and the other half slept without alcohol.
