Anoxia: Learn about the causes

Learn about the causes, symptoms, and treatment options for Anoxia, a condition characterized by a lack of oxygen to the body's tissues. What is anoxia? Anoxia happens when your body or brain completely loses its oxygen supply. Anoxia is usually a result of hypoxia. This means that a part of your body doesn’t have enough oxygen. Anoxia is an extreme form of hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the blood) in which there is a complete lack of oxygen supply to the body as a whole or to a specific organ or tissue region. Anoxia can result from inadequate amounts of oxygen in the air, such as at high altitudes, from an inability of your blood to load and carry oxygen to tissues and organs, from the inability of the heart to pump and distribute the oxygenated blood adequately, or from respiratory failure that prevents the ... Anoxia can result from a number of conditions including cardiac arrest, carbon monoxide poisoning, stroke, brain injury, and complications due to anesthesia. It is thought that cells exposed to anoxia release glutamate. The CA1 cells of the hippocampus contain high concentrations of glutamate and are particularly vulnerable to subnormal oxygenation levels. Therefore, it appears that the action of glutamate on these cells is the putative mechanism mediating cell death in this region of the ...