Mammals Can Breathe Through Their Intestines (gizmodo.com) 74
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting. The team's research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish use a similar method to gain additional oxygen in the natural world, this doesn't appear to be an evolutionary adaptation for mammals. In other words, mammalian bodies can't naturally do this, but with a little push from modern science, it becomes possible. Previous research has seen oxygen injected directly into mammalian bloodstreams, prolonging the lives of rabbits, but the rectal approach to the low-oxygen problem is novel.
The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing. These treatments prolonged the animals' survival in a low-oxygen setting by staving off respiratory failure. Mice were given both the gas and liquid oxygen delivery methods, while the rats and pigs only received the liquid treatment. In a lab-controlled hypoxic setting (a chamber that was 9.5% oxygenated), mice without the supplemental oxygenation died after about 11 minutes. With the treatment, three-quarters of the tested mice survived for nearly an hour in the same lethal conditions. ScienceAlert adds these details: Initially, their research subjects were mice, who were thankfully anesthetized for the next part. The researchers developed an oxygen ventilation system to be inserted anally; they induced hypoxia via tracheal intubation, and compared mice ventilated intestinally to control mice who received no ventilation. Of the control mice, not a single one survived longer than 11 minutes. This was in marked contrast to the mice receiving intestinal oxygen, 75 percent of which survived for 50 minutes.
The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing. These treatments prolonged the animals' survival in a low-oxygen setting by staving off respiratory failure. Mice were given both the gas and liquid oxygen delivery methods, while the rats and pigs only received the liquid treatment. In a lab-controlled hypoxic setting (a chamber that was 9.5% oxygenated), mice without the supplemental oxygenation died after about 11 minutes. With the treatment, three-quarters of the tested mice survived for nearly an hour in the same lethal conditions. ScienceAlert adds these details: Initially, their research subjects were mice, who were thankfully anesthetized for the next part. The researchers developed an oxygen ventilation system to be inserted anally; they induced hypoxia via tracheal intubation, and compared mice ventilated intestinally to control mice who received no ventilation. Of the control mice, not a single one survived longer than 11 minutes. This was in marked contrast to the mice receiving intestinal oxygen, 75 percent of which survived for 50 minutes.
So that explains it... (Score:5, Funny)
Before I deleted my Twitter account in response to the censorship issue, I kept encountering mammals who used the platform to talk through their intestines.
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"Dr. Crank, what have you learned from your many years of monkey torture?"
"They hate it. The whole being tortured thing. Drives them nuts."
Re: So that explains it... (Score:2)
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aha (Score:3, Funny)
Deep breath. (Score:2, Funny)
Wow. Who knew goatse was a visionary.
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Wow. Who knew goatse was a visionary.
He was just showing us the way.
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Many mammals breathe with their intestines. Goatse was singing opera. Most likely Mozart's "Queen of the Night".
First you let it breathe, then ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The team being Japanese... (Score:2)
...Expect the hentai adpatation in 3... 2... 1...
and live the porn version (with cuadriculated/censored genitalia) in 6... 5... 4... ;-)
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You seriously think it doesn't already exist?
It exists, but not framed as a "Scientific Experiment"
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This could really be useful (Score:4, Insightful)
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Think about comatose patients. Intestinal ventilation might make a whole lot of difference for some types of lung failure. We have ECMO today, but if this works it might become an interesting alternative.
That's mentioned in TFA and they did experiments using oxygenated perfluorocarbon as a medium, to simplify and make the procedure safer as the original required abrasion of the intestinal mucosa in order to achieve the most efficient oxygen delivery. From later in TFA:
So, the team tried enriching a perfluorocarbon with oxygen, and using that to treat mice, rats and pigs.
The mice were placed in a low-oxygen chamber; those treated with the perfluorocarbon ventilation were able to walk for longer than untreated mice, and more oxygen reached their hearts. Rats were also treated to assess whether their bodies absorbed the perfluorochemical, to determine its safety.
Finally, using perfluorochemical intestinal ventilation, respiratory distress was reduced in anesthetized pigs under non-lethal hypoxic conditions. When treated, their skin grew warm and flushed, and their oxygen levels increased, without obvious side effects.
It's unclear if a similar approach would work for humans, but the team is optimistic.
"The level of arterial oxygenation provided by our ventilation system, if scaled for human application, is likely sufficient to treat patients with severe respiratory failure, potentially providing life-saving oxygenation," Takebe said.
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Think about comatose patients. Intestinal ventilation might make a whole lot of difference for some types of lung failure. We have ECMO today, but if this works it might become an interesting alternative.
Good luck finding a nurse to do CPR that way.
try as i might (Score:1)
I can only seem to exhale
True. (Score:1)
fire up the rocket ships! (Score:1)
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Clever, very funny.
With threats of space being militarized, we might never get there - we will be surrounded by our enemas.
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We really need to change the name of that planet to kill these jokes once and for all.
research to change anti-vaxxers minds (Score:2)
If the prospect of having to breath through your butt doesn't convince the vaccine hesitant to get their COVID-19 vaccine shots, nothing will.
For additional fear, threaten to feed anti-vaxxers Taco Bell if they end up being hospitalised.
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Woo! (Score:2)
This is what the anti-vaxxers have to look forward to. Forget ventilators... we'll give you an O2 enema!
Did they have to kill them? (Score:2)
Sigh, the disrespect and disregard for animal life is the major reason I quit doing drug research. That and I couldn't get rats to self administer drugs because I let them socialize instead of raising maladjusted social deviants.
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Sometimes a few bats escape.
If I can only breathe through my asshole... (Score:2)
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Nah man, we're having fun watching.
Dead end research (Score:5, Informative)
This was an experiment well done, and it adds interesting information to the body of medical science. But, transferring this to human care is a pipe dream. It is plausible to envision this as a VERY short term stopgap method to sustain semi-adequate arterial oxygen in acute or desperate situations, such as in the field after severe chest trauma, but as a means of sustained support for many days as covid pneumonia is running its course - no. There are barriers of physics and physiology that the method cannot overcome.
Keep in mind that the lung "knows" how to do this already, so maintaining sufficient oxygen flux into the body to sustain life is possible. Furthermore, we have ecmo - extra-corporal membrane oxygenators - in essence an artificial lung that can and does keep people alive for days or weeks at a time in the face of desperately sick lungs. And, do not forget the heart lung machine, in use since 1953 for open heart surgery. These technologies work because our engineering and manufacturing can solve this problem. Getting oxygen into the blood is conceptually easy to understand and build for. The problem is that the intestine is just not built that way.
Oxygen flux into the blood is a combination of (1) the inherent diffusibility of oxygen through "the medium" which is the alveolar wall in the lung, (2) the diffusion pathway which is the thickness of that medium which has inherent transport resistance or diffusion delays, and (3) the surface area for absorption. How do lungs and bowel compare?
1 - Assuming that the diffusion coefficient or "resistivity" or admittance of the tissues for oxygen is similar in intestinal mucosa and alveolar septae, then items 2 & 3 stack up this way:
2 - In the lung, diffusion pathway from alveolar airspace to blood in the subjacent capillaries is very small. Alveolocytes and angiocytes are vey thin in these areas, and tightly adherent, for a diffusion pathway under half a micron, as little as 0.1. One of the key problems when lungs are sick is that interstitial edema or cell and protein infiltrates substantially widen the septae and the diffusion distance. That diffusion barrier is like a resistor in an electrical circuit, and the more there is, the less current or flux, and arterial oxygen drops. Our clinical therapies when lungs are sick strive in many ways to reduce that distance. In the intestine, capillaries are in the submucosae under the basement membrane, and the mucosal cells themselves, specialized for chemical and fluid absorption and secretion at transfer or flux rates markedly slower than gas exchange in the lungs, are big and thick cells. This makes the transit pathway about 10-20 microns, about 100 times as much as in the lung, and thus flux, as mass-per-surface-per-time is already markedly lower in the bowel which is designed to absorb lipids and protein-carbohydrate digestates at a slow rate.
3 - The average human adult lung has on the order of 75 square meters of alveolar surface. This is because the thoracic volume is septated into tiny alveoli about 100-200 microns across, leading to a massive surface area. in comparison, the intestine is a cylinder just a few cm diameter, and a few meters long. Its absorptive area is increased by villi, likewise about 200 microns diameter, and microvilli, but even so, total surface area from mouth to anus is about 35 sq meters, half the lung, and only part of that is accessible or usable for hypothetical gas ventilation. So, we have a huge surface area mismatch between lung and bowel.
Between these two factors, a much longer slower diffusion pathway, and at hypothetical best only half the surface area, the intestine cannot support sufficient oxygen transport to meet he body's needs without introducing a bunch of other therapeutic tricks to increase oxygen exposure, increase absorption flux, or decrease demand - all of which we can do for short periods of time but not for the course of treatment of a covid patient.
Next is the scale factor - the biology of scale.
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A good summary, and I completely agree that suggestions added by the editorialisation of the study are inane on the face of it. But that's because journalists tend to be utterly scientifically illiterate clickbait seekers.
In this case, I suspect this is less about "functional therapeutic interventions" and more about understanding the specific functionality of relevant systems in mammals. Base research if you will. Most base research doesn't lead to any specific practical inventions. But it's still importan
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Yes, precisely.
Well stated, thank you.
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Most of what you say is informative, but I think you're too dismissive of potential applications. This could be a very useful field treatment for obstructed airways. Even if this can only deliver 5% as much oxygen as the lungs, it's still enough to keep the brain alive until a better procedure can be performed.
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They've been marketing this for quite some time as being a healthier alternative to drinking carbonated water.
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It's comments like this that make me continue to read Slashdot.
Thank you for your extremely informed and intelligent comments on this matter. Makes perfect sense.
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While we do know how to build ECMO and heart-lung machines, their use is not nearly without impact as your description suggests. It is actually quite difficult to handle blood, whether outside or inside the body, without damaging it. That's the fundamental reason artificial hearts remain a pipe dream despite half a century of intense research and development, and the best we currently have are temporary assist devices.
The report here, of being able to supplement oxygen delivery through a less invasive met
But can it extract oxygen from water? (Score:2)
Rectum? (Score:2)
Damn near killed em!
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
Seriously though, there has to be better ways to test this without torturing and killing various small mammals (when I did behavioral neuroscience research we called it "sacrificing" as if that made it better). Take samples and study those? It's something going on at least at the cellular level, or a number of interacting levels, it shouldn't take torture and death to figure that out. What are we barbarians? Oh, nevermind. Sometimes we are just that.
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Since you're being "serious".... I haven't got this complex problem figured out, but you seem to understand it better than I and professional medical researchers.
This sounds like an opportunity for you. Think of something better, since it seems obvious to you. Patent it, and use social pressure for universities to pay higher for your solution, as it's more ethical. Go ahead, since you seem to have the problem solved. If not you, then who? If not now, then?
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Lawyers and Politicians (Score:1)
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What about CO? (Score:3)
Carbon dioxide is the other side of the equation... and generally things die faster from that than of oxygen deprivation. Does the rectum also expel carbon dioxide? If so, can this be a better solution to diving gear?
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Anyway. Yes, when you fart CO2 is expelled. Other gasses would be dioxygen, methane, a bit of dihydrogen, and a whole lot of dinitrogen.
Among them, depending on what you ate are going to be some sulfur compounds as well, which imbue the release with an enchanting aroma.
This should not be surprising given the gut bacteria we all have in us. When they ferment the stuff that we eat, at least some gasses that they produce as through their metabol
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As much as I love diving, I'm quitting if that becomes the only option.
As for a better option - the limiting factor for current gear is more due to ability of your body to get rid if excess nitrogen when you ascend, and prevent oxygen toxicity at depth.
Dive time limits are set by this, and the use of exotic gas mixtures are all about trying to mitigate these two problems.
Ass breathing isn't going to help you with oxygen toxicity if it requires an enriched oxygen level to work - that's going to make your air
yup, yogis do that (Score:3)
So a fart is ... (Score:1)
... exhaling ?
Show of hands (Score:2)
Who here hasn't had one of those moments where you fart and are able to temporarily breathe through your asshole?
Ig Nobel material (Score:1)
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Wow (Score:2)
What this says to me is (Score:1)
Futurama Was Right (Score:1)
Fixed that for ya... (Score:3)
Initially, their research subjects were Montana natives, who were not anesthetized for the next part. The researchers developed a covid disinformation injection system to be inserted anally; they induced hypoxia via prolonged exposure to Robert F Kennedy Jr's online postings, and compared Montanans injected with disinformation intestinally to control Montanans who received no disinformation. Of the control Montanans, all survived and propered. This was in marked contrast to the Montanans receiving intestinal disinformation, 75 percent of which survived for 50 minutes before dying in a truely gruesome fashion.
ftfy
Pull a joke (Score:2)
When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity
Push my finger!
Not really surprising (Score:2)
Idea (Score:2)
Liquid ventilation (like in the movie the Abyss) is a real thing. One of the major issues with it is that lungs are very poorly equipped to handle large volumes of fluid. Mechanically they aren't evolved to deal with it beyond gestation.
This technology could conceivably offer a better alternative. The oxygen carrying capacity of perfluorocarbons used for liquid ventilation is an order of magnitude higher than water, and it doesn't take a particularly clever mechanism to have a flow-through or recirculating
No Shit? (Score:2)
Anal probe mystery solved (Score:2)
David Blaine's Perfluorocarbons Enema (Score:1)
I wouldn't be surprised that's how he held his breath for 17 minutes. You can even cool the perfluorocarbons to cause hypothermia. "In sedated and paralyzed mammals, acute uncomplicated 0.5- to 3-h hypothermia decreases the global cerebral metabolic rate for glucose (CMR(glc)) and oxygen (CMRo(2)) but maintains a slightly better energy level, which indicates that ATP breakdown is reduced more than its synthesis."
Four-assed monkey (Score:1)
Could this be the real reason? (Score:2)
Could this be the *real* reason for tall the reports of aliens "probing" their abductees?
hmm.
hawk
Knowledge. (Score:1)
In any event we have learned a little more about about things work. I can't imagine that being a bad thing.
Rubbish (Score:1)
In my limited testing, only loud exhaling is possible.