Mount Everest and Makalu Cold Injury Amputation: 40 Years On
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Freezing cold injuries (frostbite) of the extremities are a common injury among alpinists participating in high altitude expeditions, particularly during inclement weather conditions. Anecdotally, a digit that has suffered frostbite may be at greater risk to future cold injuries. In this case study, we profile a 62-year-old elite alpinist who suffered multiple digit amputations on both his hands and foot after historic summit attempts on Makalu (8481 m) and Mt. Everest (8848 m) in 1974-1979. We describe the clinical treatment he received at that time, and follow up his case 40 years after the first incidence of frostbite utilizing a noninvasive evaluation of hand and foot function to a cold stress test, including rates of re-warming to both injured and non-injured digits. Finger rates of recovery to the cold stress test were not different (0.8 vs. 1.0°C·min(-1)) except one (injured, left middle finger, distal phalanx; 0.4°C·min(-1)). Toe recovery rates after cold-water immersion were identical between previously injured and non-injured toes (0.2°C·min(-1)). Thermocouple data indicate that this alpinist's previous frostbite injuries may not have significantly altered his digit rates of re-warming during passive recovery compared to his non-injured digits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".