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Abstract
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INTRODUCTION: It has been widely believed that tissue nitrogen uptake from the lungs during breath-hold diving would be insufficient to cause decompression stress in humans. With competitive free-diving, however, diving depths have been ever increasing over the past decades.
METHODS: A case of a competitive free-diving athlete is presented who suffered stroke-like symptoms after surfacing from the last dive of a series of three deep breath-hold dives. A literature/web-search was performed to screen for similar cases of subjects with serious neurological symptoms after deep breath-hold dives. CASE DETAILS: A previously healthy 31-year old athlete experienced right-sided motor weakness and difficulty speaking immediately after surfacing from a breath-hold dive to a depth of 100m. He had performed two preceding breath-hold-dives to that depth with surface intervals of only 15min. The presentation of symptoms and neuroimaging findings supported a clinical diagnosis of stroke. Three more cases of neurological insults were retrieved by literature/web-search; in all cases the athletes presented with stroke-like symptoms after single breath-hold dives of depths exceeding 100m. Two of these cases only had a short delay to recompression treatment and had completely recovered from the insult.
CONCLUSIONS: This report highlights the possibility of neurological insult, e.g. stroke, due to cerebral arterial gas embolism as a consequence of decompression stress after deep breath-hold dives. Thus, stroke as a clinical presentation of cerebral arterial gas embolism should be considered another risk of extreme breath-hold diving.
Language: en |