A BIOCHEMICAL STUDY OF DIVERS (I)
1971 Volume 9 Issue 3 Pages 113-136
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1971 Volume 9 Issue 3 Pages 113-136
It has been well known from experience that among the divers, who were ap-parently healthy without any troubles, two types, strong and weak were present. A strong diver is one who is not susceptible to decompression sickness, and a weak one is the converse. Generally, old people and people who are fat are not suitable for diving work. Decompression sickness might be avoidable if the divers could be clas-sified into the two groups by some scientific methods. For finding out the method we examined preliminary about 20 divers and 10 normal people biochemically, and the results were compared with a self-rating by the divers themselves into strong and weak. The results were as follows :
(a) Total cholesterol content in the blood of the divers were in the normal range, although that of weak divers were larger than the strong.
(b) Free cholesterol content in the blood of divers was about one-third of that of normal people.
(c) Ester cholesterol of weak divers was larger than strong ones.
(d) The velocity of nitrogen gas uptake by the blood of the weak was larger than the strong.
(e) Oxygen affinity of hemoglobin molecule of most divers examined showed a marked raise.
(f) In most divers examined, pH down and pCO2 increase of the venous blood were observed.
One year later of this study, nearly same examination was carried out on many divers in Japan. The results will be reported in a next paper.
