A number of transient focal neurological disorders have been described at altitude. Have any Eagles seen this one?
When I was skiing for the SCGB in Wengen a few years ago I had a french guy in my group who experienced some very odd symptoms during the evening after a days skiing around the Grindewald area. He was generally confused, lost his memory, kept repeating himself and didn't know where he was, but was extremely happy. When I described the symptoms to another guest in the hotel who was a retired neuro surgeon (Sebastien Fairweather) he identified it as a transient euphoric disorder (or something like that). The guy went off to hospital for a check up and was found to be okay, made a full recovery and i never saw him again.
Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?
Brian's story sounds (to a retired medic) as disturbance of memory and orientation rather than of speech. Doctors can be very pedantic about this sort of thing as the causes and implications are different. This one sounds to me like something called Transient Global Amnesia, though I have not heard of it associated with euphoria. We would get a better opinion from PaulCooper who's a neurologist; he may also know more about the speech disorder thing...this would worry me much more (again as a non-specialist) as it might imply insufficient oxygen (worsened at atlitiude?) to speech centres in the brain (whereas TGA is not thought to be related to lack of blood supply...)
Transient Global Amnesia That was it - but I forgot what it was called ?
Brian (and Anthony) thats fascinating. TGA has certainly been described in association with altitude. You probably have no way of contacting this guy have you? I have been putting feelers out about this subject through a variety of climbing and medical channels and have had a lot of responses from all across the world. The characteristics of these syndromes seem to be:
1. focal neurological deficit (vision/speech/memory etc)
2. Transient with full recovery
3. Often associated with headache but no other signs of raised intracranial pressure or HACE.
4. Often in well acclimatised individuals.
There is a very good description in the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 7 "Upon that Mountain - Eric Shipton".
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10731904/
Very interesting Philip, thanks for the summary and the links to papers. Have you been looking into this because you’ve seen it yourself in someone in a ski party?
I have an email address. I’ll email it to you
I have started a similar thread on UKC. Several reports of this:
Yes exactly happened to me once four years ago January Nepal. I was at around 4000m. No problem with acclimatisation, no headache or other symptoms. I couldn’t think of the word ‘sleeping bag’, nor colour ‘yellow’ when I looked at the bag or my boots. I was at the end of an ordinary trek day going to bed, winter Nepal. After 10 minutes the words came back to me and I then slept. I put it down as a TIA and accepted it. Nothing ever before then nor since. It gave me a little fright at the time and for the past three years I occasionally say the words ‘sleeping bag, Oly Mons, Spantiks, yellow’ before sleeping. Even now here in Nepal for the past 14 months, I’ve said those same words many times before sleeping, and as recently as last week in Lobuche