While breathing in too much oxygen might have negative effects, are you aware of the negative repercussions of breathing in too little? According to scientists, breathing air that is higher in oxygen than what your body needs can cause illnesses and, in extreme situations, even death. The scientific understanding of the subject and its significance for health has been broadened by a recent Gladstone Institutes study.
The study describes how breathing air with varying oxygen concentrations - from too little to just right or too much - affects the synthesis and breakdown of several proteins in the heart, brain, and lungs of mice. It was published in the journal Science Advances. The study also sheds insight on a specific protein that might play a key role in controlling how cells react to hyperoxia.
Gladstone Assistant Investigator Isha Jain said, “These results have implications for many different diseases. More than one million people in the US breathe supplemental oxygen every day for medical reasons, and studies suggest it could be making things worse in some cases. That’s just one setting where our work is starting to explain what’s happening and how the body responds.”
The first author of the new paper and a graduate student at UC San Francisco, Kirsten Xuewen Chen, said, “Our study enters uncharted territory by using mice and looking downstream of gene expression at which proteins abnormally accumulate or degrade in response to different oxygen concentrations.”