discover that humans could breathe through the anus

Passing an oxygen-rich liquid through the anus could save your life. This staggering discovery could potentially change the way hospital intensive care units cope with the lack of ventilators, so expensive and necessary in the current context of the coronavirus pandemic.

The new treatment for defective lungs that involves such a process has been successfully tested on pigs, so specialists deduce that it could also work with humans, which would be a medical breakthrough.

Currently, people with low blood oxygen levels can be treated in intensive care with a respirator, which blows air into their lungs. But this usually requires sedation and can damage delicate lung tissue. “It can be really dangerous,” says Takanori Takebe of Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan.

Takebe wondered whether people can absorb oxygen through their intestines, which happens in some freshwater fish. In mammals, the rectum is lined with a thin membrane that allows certain compounds to be absorbed into the bloodstream, and doctors are already taking advantage of this by administering certain drugs in the form of suppositories.

Takebe’s team tested the idea on pigs by giving them enemas of a type of liquid called perfluorocarbon, which may contain high levels of oxygen. “These fluids have been studied as a way to breathe fluids and are already being used to help protect the lungs of premature babies, so they’re probably not toxic when used in this new way,” Takebe explains.

The researchers anesthetized four pigs and put them on a ventilator that gave them a lower than normal respiratory rate, which caused their blood oxygen levels to drop. When two of the pigs have received oxygenated liquid enemas, replaced once an hour, your blood oxygen level has increased significantly after each infusion. The same effect occurred when the liquid was administered through a tube surgically inserted into the rectums of the other two pigs.

If there is an effect of similar size in people, it would be enough to provide medical benefitsaid Takebe. He believes the approach could be particularly useful in low-income countries that have fewer intensive care facilities. “Respirators are very expensive and require a number of medical personnel to administer them. This is just a simple enema. “

“One problem is that bowel function can be affected in people sick enough to require intensive care, which can cause diarrhea, ”says Stephen Brett of Imperial College London. “It is too early to say if this has any advantage,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Caleb Kelly of the Yale School of Medicine, United States, wrote that “this it’s a provocative idea and those who meet him for the first time will express their astonishment. But the idea of ​​fecal transplants for people with recurrent bowel infections has also met initial resistance for “cosmetic reasons”, although it is now accepted, “he concluded.

Source: new scientist