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Scientists Keep Rabbits Alive With Oxygen Microparticle Injections
ananyo writes "Rabbits with blocked windpipes have been kept alive for up to 15 minutes without a single breath, after researchers injected oxygen-filled microparticles into the animals' blood. Oxygenating the blood by bypassing the lungs in this way could save the lives of people with impaired breathing or obstructed airways (abstract). In the past, doctors have tried to treat low levels of oxygen in the blood, or hypoxaemia, and related conditions such as cyanosis, by injecting free oxygen gas directly into the bloodstream. But oxygen injected in this way can accumulate into larger bubbles and form potentially lethal blockages."
I can see this as a major help in organ transplants like lung and heart. Also there's a potential for cystic fibrosis since it bypasses the lungs.
I wonder how many rabbits they sacrificed to doing this.
From the summary, it sounds like the rabbit died after 15 minutes.
CO2 must also be removed. that's probably what ultimately killed the rabbits.
Besides overloading the red blood cells with CO2 and preventing the removal from the cells, it also screws up the PH of the blood really quick. I assume that with this process it could get bad enough to lead to shock.
Now what would be really cool would be if they could come up with a sold-state exchanger for CO2 to O2. Something like a fuel cell in reverse - create a chemical exchange from an electrical power. Implant that into a body and it could run on batteries instead of breathing. But I don't think that technology in that form currently exists. They have "rebreathers" but those are huge space-suit-size affairs and operate on a far more involved process.
But I bet someone's working on it right now. Probably several someones.
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Fair comment. I wonder how many PETA vegans who develop fibrosis in the lungs will turn down any potential treatment to keep them alive developed from this. That is what the lung transplant girl from Ottawa recently in the news suffered from. I was acquainted with someone who passed away from this. And there were an inordinate amount of workers at a plant in Missouri that made flavouring for microwave popcorn that developed fibrosis in the lungs too. Essentially your lungs get hard like scar tissue and can't flex, and you basically suffocate because you can't draw in enough air. That has to be just as shitty.
On another note, there are a lot of scifi stories where people are immersed in liquid which is super oxygenated in order to combat G-force. I wonder if this new discovery could be used in conjunction with a potential solution to high G-load.
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Thats something sci-fi pulled out of the US Air Force books actually. Also Canadian Air Force books. It was originally thought up as a concept in canada to combat the massive g-forces the avro arrow could generate. It turned out it wasn't needed. Its been tested extensively by the US since(and there was some testing done in canada as well) but never used for any regular procedures afaik. It has also seen some testing for under water purposes, deep diving(Similar problems to massive g-forces and ridiculous altitudes)
I've actually tried it myself at a marine research facility. Its extremely fucked and you can choke to death while being fully oxygenated(if you're a wuss, essentially). Also excess fluid left in the lungs can cause infections etc to set in.
Doing something dangerous enough to have a paramedic crew standing next to you when you start it is a bit of a head trip too.
Once you're in there tho... its not even slightly comfortable. It feels like your chest is being heavily pressed on and you have this constant drowning feeling that takes a bit to get over. Overall, I'd say thats probably the main reason it hasn't been used much. On paper the whole deal is fantastic. In reality, not so much.
Why, why, why are these stories always "save peoples lives" angled? How cool would it be to dive with this stuff running in your veins? I bet the liquid is incompressible too. I wonder what the ratio of volume of the liquid versus how much oxygen contained within it is.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Hell, not to mention organ donation. If you have a severe enough head trauma such that the person is /undeniably/ dead, something like this could save a lot of organs, and by extension, a lot of other lives.
You think waterboarding is torture? Wait until some goon figures out how to use this technique to allow them to keep their victim alive as they experience their own suffocation. Over. and. Over.
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You see no problem with pumping a human being full of a non-blood liqued at a rapid rate?
The human in question would either explode OR the blood will become ever more diluted until all you got is the new liqued which isn't blood. And you need blood to survive, even if you are not a vampire.
The article makes this pretty damn clear, it is not for surgery, it is for emergencies. There already exist perfectly fine methods for putting oxygen into blood, they are used routinely during surgery. But they are bulky and slow, so they can't be used on the scene of an accident or in an emergency room.
This method is for keeping a patient alive until surgeons can save him. It is to stretch the window between incident and surgery to give emergency services more time. You would be suprised how advanced medicine is in saving people and how hard it is to get that advanced care available fast enough to work in an accident that could happen anywhere EVEN outside a hospital! Amazing I know but people do insist on getting accidents more then a minute away from a emergency room.
If it could be allowed legally, it might become possible for ambulance crew to give patients a shot of this stuff and make sure their brain has oxygen enough to survive until proper life support systems can take over.
But you CANNOT just pump a human being full of non-blood and expect them to survive.
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there's no action that you can perform in this world without directly causing death to many creatures.
a vegan just draws the line a little lower than everyone else.
in nature, all is expendable. better get used to it.
Because it will *hurt*. You still need to breathe out to get rid of carbon dioxide. It is not lack of oxygen, but build-up of CO2 that makes you feel like you need to breathe. Don't breathe out long enough and you'll find the pH of your blood going down, which is not very healthy. I imagine having these oxygen injections without breathing will feel a lot like asphyxiation, except that instead of passing out in 3 or 4 minutes, the experience will last 15 minutes.
Also, as mentioned in the article, these microparticles don't magically disappear so you can't keep adding them indefinitely.