Individual resistance of the organism and nerve cell to hypoxia

The correlation between the pattern of a neuron's reaction to acute hypoxia and individual resistance to oxygen deficit is studied on rats in vivo as well as on surviving slices of their cerebellum in vitro. According to the survival time in a pressure chamber simulating an altitude of 11 km all the rats were divided into groups of high resistance, medium resistance, and low resistance to hypoxia. Survival time was 4.2 times longer in the high resistance group than in the low resistance group. In the cerebellar slices of high resistance animals 61.5% high-resistance neurons and 38.5% low-resistance neurons were recorded. On the other hand, in the high resistance animals the percentage of high-resistance neurons and low-resistance neurons was 31.2 and 68.8, respectively. The period of hypoxia development was 4.32 times longer in the high-resistance neurons as compared to low-resistance neurons. It is speculated that individual differences in the resistance to O2 deficit are of a hereditary nature and manifest themselves not only on the level of the whole organism, but also in the individual nerve cell. © 1995 Plenum Publishing Corporation.