The problems of individual sensitivity and tolerance of an organism to environmental exposures refer to most fundamental challenges of physiology being tackled for a long time. Meanwhile, different authors may be at variance in interpreting the terms “sensitivity” and “tolerance”. This review summarizes literature data on the issues of interpreting and assessing sensitivity and tolerance to hypoxia. A special focus is on those studies which compare the initial individual response of an organism to hypoxia and its viability at subsequent stages of hypoxic and other extreme exposures. When resolving these issues, it is necessary to allow for the existence of two opposite life support strategies, active and passive. The first strategy takes advantage of early detecting detrimental exposures and mobilizing energy resources aimed at their avoidance. The second strategy implies saving (instead of mobilizing) energy resources due to hierarchical functional activity limitation (downregulation) which allows an organism to survive exposure as long as possible at relatively low sensitivity and reactivity. The existence of the second strategy disallows unambiguous interpretation of results of hypoxic tolerance assessment based on analyzing functional disorders, such as mental and physical performance decrement and locomotor incoordination, which arise under hypoxic exposures.

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评估动物和人类对缺氧的敏感性和耐受性的问题

个人对生物体的敏感性和对环境暴露的耐受性问题是长期解决生理学最基本的挑战。同时，不同的作者在解释“敏感性”和“耐受性”时可能会有所不同。这篇综述总结了有关解释和评估对缺氧的敏感性和耐受性问题的文献数据。特别关注那些比较生物体对缺氧的初始个体反应及其在低氧和其他极端暴露随后阶段的生存能力的研究。解决这些问题时，有必要考虑到两种相对的生命支持策略，即主动策略和被动策略。第一种策略利用了及早发现有害暴露并调动能源资源以避免此类危害的优势。第二种策略意味着由于分级的功能活动限制（下调）而节省（而不是动员）能量资源，这使生物体能够以相对较低的敏感性和反应性尽可能长时间地幸免于暴露。第二种策略的存在不允许基于对功能性疾病的分析来明确解释低氧耐受性评估的结果，这些功能性疾病是由于低氧暴露引起的精神和身体机能下降以及运动不协调。