Fans of this page know that I've been writing about how low oxygen and hypoxic injury relates to the MS brain.

Found a great paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that discusses how hypoxic environments, like high altitudes, can create inflammation and signal the immune system in the brain.  It was written by some specialists in high altitude and hypoxia, researchers at the University of Colorado in Denver.

In persons with mountain sickness, for example, levels of circulating proinflammatory cytokines increase, and leakage of fluid ("vascular leakage") causes pulmonary or cerebral edema.  Increased serum levels of interleukin-6, the interleukin-6 receptor, and c-reactive protein--all markers of inflammation--were increased in healthy volunteers who spent 3 nights at an elevation higher than 3400 m.  

The development of inflammation in response to hypoxia is clinically relevant....

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0910283

My husband Jeff came home from the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City in his first, soon to be diagnosed MS flare.  His serum inflammation numbers were through the roof.  And that's how this journey began for us.   I've written about his problems with altitude and low oxygen environments in this note.  

link to note

Slowed perfusion created by truncular venous malformations can create a low oxygen environment in the brain and start the inflammatory process.  Now that researchers are considering inflammation, and not the immune system, as the cause of MS....might they consider hypoxia???  High levels of MS diagnosis in new residents to Colorado (and other northern latitudes)  would be a great place to start.

Joan