Just look at this incredible clip showing how the entire abdominal & pelvic cavity moves with breathing! The quality of your breathing mechanics is far wider reaching than just your lungs. The diaphragm is a huge massaging muscle on the gut contents. Therefore, improving breathing mechanics & diaphragm function has the potential to improve digestive, renal, adrenal, liver, uterine, ovarian, pelvic floor, bowel & bladder function. Pretty breathtaking dontcha think!?
The 2019 Nobel Prize in physiology was awarded 4 days ago to William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe & Gregg L. Semenza for their newest discoveries that revealed the mechanism for one of life’s most essential adaptive processes. They established the basis for our understanding of how oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism & physiological function.
The practical application of this discovery means breathing exercises that can improve oxygen levels (like the Wim Hof Method - The Iceman (Wim Hof)) can impact anemia, cancer, stoke, infection, wound healing & myocardial infarctions!!For our science nerds, they discovered how the von Hippel-Lindau gene (VHL gene), a tumor suppressor gene, regulates a newly discovered complex that was named hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF).
HIF was discovered by these scientists because they were researching the hormone erythropoietin (EPO). The 1938 Nobel Prize in Physiology to Corneille Heymans awarded discoveries showing how blood oxygen sensing via the carotid body controls our respiratory rate by communicating directly with the brain. A key physiological response to hypoxia (when the body or a region of the body is deprived of adequate oxygen supply at the tissue level) is the rise in levels of the hormone erythropoietin (EPO), which leads to increased production of red blood cells (erythropoiesis) - an example of this is high altitude training. How this process was itself controlled by O2 remained a mystery until now! Semenza helped to identify the cellular components mediating this response (which led to the discovery of HIF).
It turns out that when O2 levels are high, cells contain very little HIF. However, when oxygen levels are low, the amount of HIF-1α increases so that it can bind to & thus regulate the EPO gene as well as other genes. Several research groups showed that HIF-1α, which is normally rapidly degraded, is protected from degradation in hypoxia. At normal oxygen levels, a cellular machine called the proteasome, recognized by the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose, degrades HIF-1α.
At about the same time as Semenza & Ratcliffe were exploring the regulation of the EPO gene, cancer researcher William Kaelin, Jr. was researching an inherited syndrome, von Hippel-Lindau’s disease (VHL disease). He helped discover that VHL was somehow involved in controlling responses to hypoxia. Additional clues came from several research groups showing that VHL is part of a complex that labels proteins with ubiquitin, marking them for degradation in the proteasome. Ratcliffe and his research group then made a key discovery: demonstrating that VHL can physically interact with HIF-1α and is required for its degradation at normal oxygen levels. This conclusively linked VHL to HIF-1α.
In English, this explains how oxygen sensing allows our cells to adapt their metabolism to low oxygen levels: for example, in our muscles during intense exercise. Other examples of adaptive processes controlled by oxygen sensing include the generation of new blood vessels & the production of red blood cells. Our immune system & many other physiological functions are also fine-tuned by the O2-sensing machinery. Oxygen sensing has even been shown to be essential during fetal development for controlling normal blood vessel formation & placenta development.
The awarded mechanism for
oxygen sensing has fundamental importance in physiology! Many
pathological processes are also affected. Intensive efforts are ongoing
to develop new ways that can either inhibit or activate the
oxygen-regulated machinery for treatment of anemia, cancer & other
diseases!
In the meantime, deep breathing is one fundemental way we can use this mechanism to enhance our function!!!
#science #chiropractor #chiropractic #research #education #evidence based #patient centered #interprofessional #collaborative #rehabilitation #public health #spinal health #musculoskeletal health #ethics #pain #function #disability #QOL
