Evaluation of the Visual Analog Score (VAS) to Assess Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) in a Hypobaric Chamber

Jialin Wu, Yu Chen and Yongjun Luo

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 11, 1-8

Abstract: Objective: The visual analog score (VAS) is widely used in clinical medicine to evaluate the severity of subjective symptoms. There is substantial literature on the application of the VAS in medicine, especially in measuring pain, nausea, fatigue, and sleep quality. Hypobaric chambers are utilized to test and exercise the anaerobic endurance of athletes. To this end, we evaluated the degree of AMS using the visual analog scale (VAS) in a hypobaric chamber in which the equivalent altitude was increased from 300 to 3500 m. Methods: We observed 32 healthy young men in the hypobaric chamber (Guizhou, China) and increased the altitude from 300 to 3500 m. During the five hours of testing, we measured the resting blood oxygen saturation (SaO2) and heart rate (HR). Using the VAS, we recorded the subjects' ratings of their AMS symptom intensity that occurred throughout the phase of increasing altitude at 300 m, 1500 m, 2000 m, 2500 m, 3000 m, and 3500 m. Results: During the phase of increasing altitude in the hypobaric chamber, the patients' SaO2 was 96.8±0.8% at 300 m and 87.5±4.1% at 3500 m (P

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113376 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 13376&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0113376

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0113376

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().