Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains how pressurized oxygen works in the blood. Normal breathing saturates hemoglobin at 98-99%, but lung disease or sleep apnea can drop it to the 80s. Pressurizing oxygen forces extra O2 to dissolve directly into plasma, delivering more oxygen to tissues and helping patients with low oxygen levels.
Most people are familiar with red blood cells carrying oxygen. Hemoglobin is the protein that the oxygen binds to. There is a percent saturation, right? So not every hemoglobin is saturated with oxygen. Usually if you're breathing well and have access to normal room air, you might be somewhere 98, 99% saturated. If there's something going on with your lungs, it might be down around 92, 94%. When people have sleep apnea, they can desaturate even further into the 80s and things, which can be problematic. But what he's talking about is that when you just take the oxygen that's in the air, 21%, let's say, sea level or close to it, and you pressurize it, you'll actually just force it into the plasma, into the liquid portion of the blood. So now you've saturated the hemoglobin, but you also have some extra carrying capacity just because it's dissolved into the blood itself. And so then when it circulates in the body, it has two sources to pull from. One, it can release oxygen from the hemoglobin, but also just sort of pull it out by diffusion out of the blood, right? So you're delivering more oxygen to the tissues.
