Medicine: Strong Men of the Andes

Ten to 16 thousand feet up in the Andes* lives a race of men with enormous energy and cast-iron hearts. Dr. Carlos Monge of Lima, Peru last week described that race, the highest in the world, to scientists at the University of Chicago’s 50th anniversary meeting (see p. 63). For his research he received an honorary degree. The thin Andes air kills weaklings. So the 12,000,000 Andes strong-hearts are the product of centuries of painful adaptation to scarcity of oxygen. In years of laboratory study. Dr. Monge found:

> Andes natives have hearts remarkably long and thick. They beat very slowly, can do 20% more work than hearts of lowlanders. Even hard labor does not speed up a native’s heart; in many cases, Dr. Monge discovered, a double load of work slows down the pulse. A native’s blood volume is larger than that of lowlanders, his veins are somewhat distended. His heart and circulation, said Dr. Monge, are like that of an athlete in training; about half the Andean men have noticeably greater strength than men at sea level. Most of them can climb a mountain “straight on.”

> Almost all lowlanders develop mountain sickness, known as soroche, if they live above 10,000 feet. (When flying at this level, aviators don their oxygen masks.) The severity of soroche varies widely with different individuals: some ruin their hearts; others become acclimatized in 15 or 20 years.

> Dr. Monge first encountered mountain sickness in 1924 when an engineer stumbled into his office on swollen legs, gasping for breath. His face was bluish red, as though he had been choked, his eyelids were swollen, all the superficial blood vessels in his body appeared distended. He was weak, drowsy, suffered from spells of blindness and deafness. When he was taken down to sea level he was “completely cured.” Since then, he gradually worked his way up to 10,000 feet. Other victims, who look healthy, may go temporarily crazy.

> Andean natives cannot stand low altitudes. “Every year,” said Dr. Monge, “about 100,000 men come down to sea level for agricultural work, but after about three months . . . like the swallows . . . they go back to the altitude.” The doctor has accustomed himself to spend several weeks a year at his red brick experimental station in Huancayo 10,000 feet up; after a few days he feels fine.

> Many living creatures cannot reproduce when they arrive at high levels. “The Spanish Conquerors,” said Dr. Monge, “. . . had no offspring until 50 years after the city [of Potosi] was founded.” But natives there since colonial days have a birth rate equal to that at sea level.

* Highest point in the U.S.—California’s Mt. Whitney, 14,495 feet high.