Dr. Caleb Kelly, a gastroenterology fellow at Yale University, was recently asked to review a paper about mammals receiving lifesaving oxygen through

Breathing Through the Rectum Saves Oxygen-Starved Mice and Pigs

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2021-05-21 17:00:07

Dr. Caleb Kelly, a gastroenterology fellow at Yale University, was recently asked to review a paper about mammals receiving lifesaving oxygen through their anuses. “I laughed, to be honest,” he said. “I thought it was a joke.”

It seems like a no-brainer that bottoms are not for breathing. But the authors of a new study, published Friday in the journal Med, are perfectly serious. They showed that when some mice or pigs are dangerously deprived of air, an enema of oxygen-carrying liquid can rescue them.

“It actually turns out it could be a feasible approach,” said Dr. Kelly, who wrote a commentary accompanying the new paper.

Dr. Takanori Takebe, of the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, was motivated to study this unusual idea by his father’s struggle with lung disease. Mechanical ventilators can keep patients alive when their lungs are failing, but these tools aren’t always available, and they can run out, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown.

And although he may be a ways off from studying the idea in human patients, Dr. Takebe said that “we clearly need different strategies to help out patients with severe lung failure.”

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