{"doi":"10.33140/croa.02.02.02","title":"Maximal Breath Hold Associated with Inappropriate Change in Respiratory Rate in Hospitalized Covid-19 Patients Indicates a Blunted Ventilatory Response","abstract":"Background: Some patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 associated disease (COVID-19) presented with hypoxemia without exhibiting dyspnea. This phenomenon was called “silent” or “happy” hypoxia. The cause of “silent hypoxia” was unknown. It was suspected that COVID-19 might be altering structures vital to the normal respiratory drive. Oxygen sensing glomus cells of the carotid bodies, express the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptors used by COVID-19 to infect cells. In a healthy person, hypoxemia stimulates carotid body neural activity triggering reflex stimulation of breathing and tachycardia. If COVID-19 infected the carotid bodies, the cells might not respond to hypoxemia. Methods: We performed a prospective observational pilot study where the ventilatory responses to breath holding tests in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were compared to healthy controls in a single medical center. The aim was to determine whether ventilatory responses to hypoxia produced by breath holding in COVID-19 patients were different from those in volunteers without COVID-19. Results: In comparison to the control group, COVID-19 patients had significantly less post breath-holding respiration rate increase after maximal breath hold effort. COVID-19 patients also had significantly less post breath-holding desaturation after maximal breath hold effort in unadjusted analysis but not statistically significant in the adjusted model. This prospective observational study demonstrated that COVID-19 infection is associated with a statistically significantly smaller breathholding increase in respiratory rate. Conclusions: The findings indicate that COVID-19 may cause a blunted hypoxic ventilatory response in the infected patients during the early stages of pandemic","journal":"COVID Research Open Access","year":2024,"id":497932,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.964,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[],"reference_count":29,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:09:38.543544Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}