Rarely do undergraduate students get listed as the lead author of scientific studies published in academic journals. It’s even less likely that a 23-year-old master’s student would have seven published papers under his belt. Yet UBC Okanagan health-and-exercise-sciences student Ryan Hoiland has accomplished both these feats.

In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight, Hoiland gave most of the credit to his thesis advisor, UBC professor Philip Ainslie, a Canada Research Chair in cerebrovascular physiology.

“He provided me with an amazing opportunity,” Hoiland said. “I would like to think that I’ve taken it upon myself to maximize the opportunity and do everything I can to make use of it, not waste it, and be successful.”

Hoiland, who was born and raised in Kelowna, caught the research bug in the first semester of his third year of university, when he began working in Ainslie’s lab. In the second semester of his third year, Hoiland was invited to do a research practicum.

His big break came when he was invited to travel to the Pyramid International Laboratory near the base camp of Mount Everest in May 2012 to study the effects of severe oxygen deprivation and blood flows on the brain.

Hoiland noted that because the lab is in such a remote location and 5,050 metres above sea level, heavy equipment—including cylinders of compressed gas—had to be transported by yaks.

According to Hoiland, there were researchers from 25 countries there. He relied on ultrasound technology to quantify blood flow into the brain. In one instance, a probe on a headset would be aimed through the temple just behind the eye. Another experiment used ultrasound to measure two pairs of neck vessels that supply blood directly to the brain.

“It’s an environment where you can’t really mess up because you can’t just go back to Mount Everest base camp the next week and recollect your data,” Hoiland said. “It’s sort of a high-stakes environment that I hadn’t been exposed to and I really enjoyed it.”

His work examined whether tests of pulmonary blood pressure at sea level can predict what might occur to people at high altitudes. The advantage of using ultrasound is that it’s far more portable than positron emission tomography or functional magnetic resonance imaging. Tests with ultrasound could be done at sea level and also at more than 5,000 metres above sea level.

Hoiland said that he and Ainslie had read research suggesting that breathing responses at sea level are related to pulmonary blood pressure when there’s a sharp reduction in oxygen in the air. They wanted to know if what had previously been demonstrated in a lab at sea level could be reproduced at a high altitude.

Hoiland’s research conducted near the base camp demonstrated that sea-level breathing tests do not correlate to pulmonary blood-pressure increases at high altitudes.

“If you go to a high altitude and you have a very large increase in pulmonary blood pressure, that’s going to predispose you to getting high-altitude pulmonary edema, which is one of the two most serious high-altitude diseases you can get—the other being high-altitude cerebral edema,” Hoiland explained.

According to the Mayo Clinic website, pulmonary edema is “caused by excess fluid in the lungs”, which makes it difficult to breathe and can be fatal. Hoiland quickly added that pulmonary blood pressure doesn’t directly translate into pulmonary edema, so it can’t be seen as a cause and effect.

“To try to use one physiological measure to determine how someone is going to be affected by a high altitude is difficult because there is so much going on,” he emphasized.

His paper on this topic appeared in the CHEST Journal, which is published by the American College of Chest Physicians.