Hypoxic preconditioning increases skin oxygenation and viability but does not alter VEGF expression or vascular density.

Intermittent hypoxia is known to elicit adaptive changes that increase tissue oxygen delivery. We investigated the effects of intermittent hypoxic exposure (IHE) in normal skin (course study) and evaluated whether preoperative IHE-preconditioning alleviates acute ischemic injury in skin flaps (flap study). For 4 weeks, 55 rats were exposed to a daily IHE-session (6 hypoxic cycles, 9% O(2), 6 to 10 min) separated by 3 min of reoxygenation (20.

Intermittent hypoxic training protects canine myocardium from infarction.

This investigation examined cardiac protective effects of normobaric intermittent hypoxia training. Six dogs underwent intermittent hypoxic training for 20 consecutive days in a normobaric chamber ventilated intermittently with N2 to reduce fraction of inspired oxygen (FiO2) to 9.5%-10%.