Webinar Tuesday Jan 6th 18:00 CET: Individual susceptibility for DCS

Photo credit: Peter Symes/xray-mag.com

We are now preparing our first 2026 meeting, to be arranged Tuesday Jan 6th at 18:00 CET. The meeting will be in English language.

The topic of this meeting will be individual susceptibility for decompression sickness (DCS).

Is it true that some of us are particularly sensitive and aquire DCS easier than other? That we suffer the "undeserved DCS"?

We will be honored by a presentation from David Doolette discussing inter- and intraindividual suscpetibility for DCS. Doolette is an assistant professor in anaesthesiology, recently retired from the US Navy Experimental Diving Unit and a very experienced technical diver. He holds a long publication list - in particular related to decompression modelling, decompression tables and decompression sickness. We will hear him discuss both the intra- and intervariability of DCS as well as venous gas emboli. (Venous gas emboli - VGE - can be detected by ultrasound and is commonly used as a proxy measure of DCS.)

Following the talk by Dr Doolette, Jan Risberg will give a talk on claimed individual risk factors for DCS. Age, sex, physical fitness, overweight, dehydration are but a few of the many factors expected to contribute to DCS risk. But what is the evidence for each of these? We will bring all of these up to debate.

Of course there will be time for questions.

We will arrange this on our Zoom platform. During our last webinar we reached the ceiling for attendants: more than 500 tried to listen and an unknown number were rejected entrance due to the limit imposed to our Zoom account. We hope this will not happen in January, but it could be a good idea to attend the meeting in advance.

We will share zoom details later.