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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 02 2019, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-I-didn't-inhale dept.

Inhaled Hydrogen Could Protect the Brain During Heart-Lung Bypass:

Newborns with life-threatening congenital heart disease often undergo open-heart surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass, which carries a risk of damaging the brain. Critically ill newborns who are placed on ECMO are at even higher risk for brain injury. Hypothermia, or cooling the body, can improve neurologic outcomes, but has limitations.

[...] When infants are placed on bypass or ECMO, blood flow is interrupted, causing temporary hypoxia, or low-oxygen conditions. The brain, a heavy oxygen user, suffers the most from oxygen deprivation. But it's when blood flow is restored and oxygen is reintroduced that the real damage occurs. Formerly oxygen-deprived cells respond to the sudden influx by forming toxic chemicals known as reactive oxygen species, which damages DNA and cell membranes.

"During the reperfusion process, the cell mitochondria overreact and end up using oxygen to injure themselves," explains John Kheir, MD, a cardiologist in Boston Children's Hospital's Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

The body tries to scavenge these chemicals, but they can overwhelm the scavenging system and injure the tissue. When this occurs in the brain, it can cause neurologic impairment.

[...] As described today in the journal JACC: Basic to Translational Medicine, the team added 2.4 percent hydrogen gas to the animals' usual ventilation gases during and after arrested blood flow and hypoxia. Compared with controls, the treated animals did significantly better on neurologic evaluations. They had fewer seizures, smaller areas of tissue injury on brain MRI and decreased chemical markers of brain and kidney injury in their blood.

Journal Reference:
Alexis R. Cole, et al. Perioperatively Inhaled Hydrogen Gas Diminishes Neurologic Injury Following Experimental Circulatory Arrest in Swine. JACC: Basic to Translational Science, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.jacbts.2018.11.006


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday May 03 2019, @01:48AM

    by sjames (2882) on Friday May 03 2019, @01:48AM (#838240) Journal

    Fortunately, given the depth it's used for, it doesn't have enough oxygen in it to explode. Humans only need an oxygen partial pressure of 0.20 ATM no matter the total pressure.

    But in general, diving is a terrible time to load up on carbon monoxide.

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