Abstract
Abstract The mechanism of arterial hypoxemia, commonly found in patients with acute myocardial infarction, has been studied in 24 patients with polarographic determination of arterial pO2 before and after ten minutes of pure oxygen breathing.Most of the patients have a reduction in arterial pO2 on air breathing and do not attain normal values for pO2 on oxygen breathing. Patients in shock or with pulmonary congestion show more severely reduced values of pO2 both on air breathing and on oxygen breathing. Calculation of the so‐called physiological shunt on air breathing and the so‐called anatomical shunt on oxygen breathing demonstrates that most of the reduction in arterial pO2 is due to disturbance of the ventilationperfusion relationships in the lungs, but a considerable amount of the reduction in pO2 is caused by shunting of pulmonary arterial blood through non‐ventilated parts of the lungs.
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