Question: what happens to your body when it the oxegen levels are really low? does your skin go like deadpools?

Dan Gordon answered on 4 Nov 2016:

I love this question. Firstly Deadpool is a great film and one of the funniest I have seen from the super-hero cannon. Anyhow, lets try and answer your question. To understand what happens when oxygen levels are low we need to first consider what happens under normal conditions of oxygen availability.
So as you sit reading this you are breathing in and out, why? Well put simply your whole body will need oxygen to allow for the process of metabolism to work. To do this we breath in oxygen from the atmospheric air that surrounds us, which is 20.93% oxygen, additionally in the atmospheric air there is carbon dioxide which account for only 0.03% of the air, the rest is nitrogen. So as you take this air in it is passed from the lungs where is it under a slightly higher pressure than O2 in the blood, into the blood stream. Once in the blood stream it is propelled around the body through the circulatory system to the locations (organs etc.) where it is needed. AT this point the O2 is extracted from the circulation and enters the cells where it is needed. At the same time CO2 which is the by-product of metabolism is passed from the cell into the circulation and eventually is expired out through breathing. So if you were to measure the concentration of O2 and CO2 being expelled through breathing they may be around 16% O2 and 3.5% CO2.
So now lets get to your question. Under certain scenarios such altitude or when we do very intense exercise the supply of O2 struggles to meet the demand for O2. Interestingly the causes of these responses are different between altitude and exercise. At altitude the air pressure drops, this means that pressure of O2 in the air gets closer to the pressure in the lungs meaning it is harder to get the O2 into the lung and then extract it. So of note is the fact tat altitude the actual concentration of O2 is no different to being at sea level. During exercise the limitation now lies with the inability to simply enough O2 from the atmospheric air to meet the demands at the muscles. In both cases we start to see a chain of events unfold. Remember in the earlier example I mentioned CO2, now when O2 is limited the amount of CO2 that is produced starts to increase in the cells. This increase in CO2 is linked with what is termed a metabolite (lactate) and more importantly hydrogen ions. These interfere with the functioning of the cells and the muscles. Thus as CO2 rises because O2 is limiting more effort is required to do the same amount of ‘work’ The result of this is that more muscles are required to do the work which means unless you suddenly changed the available amount of O2 that more CO2 will be produced.
Could this make the skin go like Deadpool. Well under chronic cases, generally associated with illness we can get a CO2 poisoning which will make the skin look pale blue, this is because the blood contains more CO2 than it would normally do. Generally though these effects are short term and can be revered by either reducing your altitude, reducing exercise intensity or increasing the amount of oxygen that you breath in.