While many serious cases of COVID-19 are marked by respiratory distress and dangerously low blood oxygen levels — a condition referred to as hypoxia — the occurrence of “silent or happy hypoxia” affecting a subset of patients has puzzled experts since the pandemic’s onset. Now, computational modeling research spearheaded at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is helping uncover the elusive cause of “happy hypoxia” in COVID-19 patients, revealing why some individuals may experience critically low blood-oxygen saturation without the typical struggle to breathe.
In findings published in the journal Biological Cybernetics, researchers suggest that elevated hemoglobin levels in certain patients’ blood might play a key role in enabling the respiratory system to sustain low oxygen levels without prompting distress signals associated with dyspnea, or shortness of breath. “Mathematical modeling of the respiratory control system allows us to explore hypotheses about how changes in chemosensory inputs affect the generation of breathing rhythms,” said Casey Diekman, the study’s corresponding author and NJIT associate professor of mathematics. “We focused on dysregulation of oxygen sensation as the key contributor to silent hypoxemia.”
To learn more, Diekman joined up with Christopher Wilson at Loma Linda School of Medicine and Peter Thomas from Case Western Reserve University. The team adapted a mathematical model Diekman first developed in 2017, describing it as a “closed-loop control system” for simulating the effects of silent hypoxemia on the respiratory system. To read the full story.