This might predispose a person to respiratory muscle pump failure resulting in unconscious changes to mood, mental status, locomotor activity and function. These anatomic changes can be subtle, unseen and only evident upon measuring respiratory rate at rest and finding it to be at the lower or higher extreme of the normal range of breathing rate. The use of accessory muscle is easy to miss. It signifies breathing that requires effort- at rest- and this is not good, especially should illness or poverty or confinement or poor living conditions weaken the health of the individual further, and unmasking respiratory pump difficulty or frank failure causing encephalopathy or change in brain function due to change to PCO2 of the blood.
Changes to PCO2 of the blood reaching the brain cannot be seen by an MRI, or even blood tests. Mitochondrial plasticity during acidosis may exist with normal 02 and HCO3 [see post on mitochondria] and confuse doctors.
Doctors need to study physical development more carefully, especially as such large changes to size of an individual from infancy to full grown young adult will never be perfect. It just needs to be “good enough” for the respiratory muscle motor system to work.
In Bipolar patients, the respiratory muscle pump is uncoupled from locomotor activity, it seems, during health. During physical illness, locomotor activity is suddenly more coupled to breathing and to PCO2 and to body temperature.
It is strange. to be continued…….
Of Sound Mind 