Denver's altitude may cause headache for Democrats

Denver: What promises to be red, white and blue - and short on O?

That would be Denver as host city for the August 25-28 Democratic National Convention.

The Mile High City has 17 per cent less oxygen than at sea level, consequently many conventioneers are likely to notice a shortness of breath. A few may suffer, for reasons researchers still do not quite understand, throbbing headaches. A fraction might get hit with altitude sickness, which can feel like a no-booze hangover: headaches along with nausea and lethargy.

But visitors and residents alike should know that Colorado's thin air, although a nuisance for the unacclimated, also is the impetus for some of the world's most advanced research on the good and bad effects of stingy oxygen levels.

North America's only two high-altitude-devoted medical clinics are in the state, where at least 600,000 people live at 2,130 metres or more above sea level. So is a high-altitude training centre for Olympic athletes, as well as a slew of university research projects on lowered oxygen and a business that is the planet's only large manufacturer of simulated altitude devices for athletes and the affluent.

"Knowledge about prevention and treatment is coming along quite nicely here," said Dr Peter Hackett, who has studied high-altitude medicine from the top of Everest to the basement of the Telluride Medical Centre for 33 years.

Hackett serves as medical director at the Institute for Altitude Medicine. He also is head of clinical services for the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine's Altitude Research Centre.

Under the direction of Dr Ben Honigman, researchers at the centre are delving into the genetics that make some people less adaptable to an increase in altitude. They are cataloging the way brains change and swell in higher altitudes, why in some pockets of high altitude babies are born skinnier, how athletes can use thin air as a powerful training tool and why Colorado's leanest-state-in-the-nation ranking may have something to do with hypoxia.