Profile: James Hambly

A St George’s student is following in Hillary and Tenzing’s footsteps and trekking up to Everest base camp to help explore the effects of high altitude oxygen deprivation.

Second year medical student James Hambly, 25, had a place in the 2007 London Marathon, but gave it up to become one of 200 volunteers trekking to Everest Base Camp at 17,225ft as part of medical research expedition Caudwell Xtreme Everest.

He set off on March 31 2007 to accompany a team, including doctors, scientists and veteran mountaineers, to Base Camp to take part in tests aiming to prove a genetic link to successful adaptation to low oxygen levels, which will help the treatment of critically ill patients.

Those climbers who aim for the summit will be confronted with temperatures down to minus 40°C, high winds, storms and critically low oxygen levels. Frostbite, exhaustion, hypothermia and high altitude illness (mountain sickness) will pose potentially fatal risks.

James has been training hard since last summer, swimming and running three times a week, plus walking the hills of Wales and Cornwall. Despite this, he confessed to a few nerves as he contemplated the 21-day climb shortly before leaving for Kathmandu, where the trek began.

“The main concern is acute mountain sickness,” he said. “Symptoms include nausea, shortness of breath, headaches and difficulty sleeping, but because we are taking quite a slow ascent, with a gentle acclimatisation I’m hoping that most of us will be OK. “If you ascend too quickly, you can get high altitude pulmonary oedema, which is fluid on the lungs, or high altitude cerebral oedema, which is fluid on the brain — both can be fatal.”

Trek leaders are taking the climb to Base Camp deliberately slowly to get as many volunteers — two of whom are in their seventies — there as possible.

The team of researchers will study oxygen deprivation in James and his fellow climbers at extreme altitudes to help them develop new treatment methods for those in critical care.

A core team hopes to climb on to the summit to complete the first tests of oxygen levels in the blood at that altitude.

James explained: “Critically ill patients in intensive care units often have low oxygen levels, but there are several difficulties with researching it in hospitals. “Firstly, many of them are unconscious, so there’s a consent issue, and secondly, deciphering exactly the reason behind their low oxygen levels is problematic — it could be because of a head injury or because their lungs aren’t working properly, or because their hearts aren’t pumping the blood around the body to the cells that need it. “With healthy volunteers you can pinpoint just the effect of the altitude and hypoxia. “I will be taking part in four sets of testing at various altitudes on the trek to Base Camp, where the group will spend three nights. The idea is to see how people respond at sea level, and how they respond at four points on the way up.”

Ski and snowboard fan James was inspired to join the trek to Everest when the expedition leader, Dr Mike Grocott, gave a talk at St George’s. “This is an extremely exciting and enormous undertaking,” James said. “The results have the potential to yield some really exciting new findings that may one day help intensive care patients.”