TY - JOUR T1 - Air travel and hypoxaemia in real life JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J SP - 236 LP - 237 DO - 10.1183/09031936.00001708 VL - 32 IS - 1 AU - J. C. Winck AU - M. Drummond AU - J. Almeida AU - J. A. Marques Y1 - 2008/07/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/32/1/236.abstract N2 - To the Editors: We read with great interest the paper by Coker et al. 1 in an issue of the European Respiratory Journal. The authors conducted the largest prospective study into the outcomes of flights in patients with various respiratory diseases, showing that 18% suffered respiratory symptoms. They concluded that, although air travel seems generally safe in this population of patients under specialist respiratory care, more detailed studies with oximetry monitoring during flight should be performed to determine which patients are most at risk. The evaluation of the risk of in-flight hypoxaemia has been determined by studies performed in altitude chambers or by hypoxic gas mixture challenge 2. However, extrapolating the findings to real flights may be misleading, due to the higher altitudes attained by newer aircraft, longer duration of altitude exposure and passengers’ activity inside the aircraft 3. We have evaluated transcutaneous arterial oxygen saturation (Sa,O2) using Pulsox 3iA (Minolta, Tokyo, Japan), a finger pulse oximeter with a 24-h internal memory and dedicated software (Pulsox DS-3; Minolta) for viewing and … ER -