It is different from asthma, or any other restriction-causing shortness of breath. I have restriction, but I also have air hunger at times. (It is intermittent for me.) I can take full, deep breaths, but I find I can't seem to get enough oxygen. I am so "hungry" for air.

First of all - love the name!

As for me - I agree that air hunger can be caused from babs.

When I first started feeling the air hunger - everyone around here kept urging me to get tested for it - but my doc at the time didn't want to.

Instead, he believed my air hunger was caused by a hypercoagulation problem - where the bacteria & viruses in the blood vessels kind of clog up the system so that it takes oxygenated blood a longer time to reach its destination.

That's my laymen's attempt at explaining a difficult biological concept. To me, it's like a morning traffic jam - you eventually arrive at your destination - only you're late & sometimes you're in trouble.

For a couple of months, I kept telling the so-called specialists: the cardiologist & the pulmonologist, that "I feel like there's not enough oxygen reaching my brain..." But they would tell me my tests for 'normal' and then they would give me strange looks - especially when I actually used the term, "air hunger". Totally clueless!

One time I had air hunger so bad that I lied down on the grocery store floor (in lieu of fainting) and then got to ride in a nice ambulance with the handsome paramedics who kept trying to force an iv tube into my arm apparently while they were blindfolded. (Who says there isn't a 'good' side to being chronically ill?!!!)

Finally, my doc started me on heparin shots - twice daily - in my stomach. It has helped tremendously!

I beleive there is more info here about it -somewhere - but I'm not the one to tell you where it is....HELP!

If no one else responds - do a search for it here on Lymenet; and then you can search for hypercoagulation on the web. ALSO, I think Dr. Crist from Missouri has a website & has some info about hypercoagulation.

Hope that helps some!

Blessings,

Like Wiseass said it can produce a clogging of the viens due to an excess of fibrin buildup. It prevents oxygen from reaching tissues in 2 ways. One is that fibrin coats the viens like Teflon becoming thicker and thicker over time. The thicker the coating the less likely oxygen can penetrate. This fibrin also prevents nutrients and meds from reaching their targets as intended.

The second thing that happens is that the tinier capillaries can become entirely sealed off by the fibrin. These little capillaries are usually closer to the surfaces of organs. One place that this becomes very obvious is on the skin. As the fibrin build up clogs the capillaries your skin can become more and more lifeless looking due to lack of oxygen. One of the ways that this can be truly apparent is people stop bruising. I could bang into something real hard and never get a bruise. It would be real sore and maybe weeks later I could see a very faint yellowish color deep below the surface of my skin, but never a bruise on the surface where the smaller cappilaris had no blood flow. You can imagine the serious consequences this will have on organs like the heart and brain, everything for that matter.