Speaking from experience, having your computer die on you at the worst possible time has become a sort regular occurrence of sorts for me, especially when writing IW articles. Pardon this almost-inappropriate segue, but, in the same way, your lungs can do the same, especially when you’re seriously ill or on the operating table.
Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence among the sick in hospitals where patients often suffer serious brain trauma or die from prolonged oxygen deprivation on the operating table while doctors try to put long-term systems (like heart-lung bypasses) into place. The methods currently available are only effective if the lungs of the patient are working at full capacity. If that is not the case, or the lungs themselves are being operated on, then even injecting pure oxygen into the blood (in an effort to keep the organs of the body functional) is not an option as oxygen bubbles could block blood vessels thereby adding to the problem. The only procedure currently in use by hospitals is to hook up to a bypass machine that oxygenates blood outside the body and then passes the blood through body again – however, this procedure is too long for a case that requires immediate attention.
As such, Dr. John Kheir of the Boston Children’s Hospital, the author of this study, suffered a similar experience where a nine-month-old girl suffered severe brain injury and died (as a result of oxygen deprivation) on his operating table in the twenty minutes taken to hook her up to the heart-lung bypass machine. This experience started him on his research to find a fast-acting solution to this problem that could do the job intravenously. His research, as reported in Science Translational Medicine, consists of oxygen-filled microspheres that are three micrometres in diameter suspended in fluids commonly used in transfusions at dilute concentrations (to allow the spheres to permeate to the smallest capillaries in the body). In vitro studies indicated that the transfer of oxygen from the microspheres to haemoglobin occurred within the four seconds of the microspheres being introduced. In vivo studies yielded more promising results as the animals did not experience organ injury even when they were asphyxiated and were only receiving oxygen from the microsphere solution.
The next steps in taking this research forward are to determine how long this form of therapy can last and how widespread the use can be for patients. Aside from use in the critical moments of an emergency, this research can be applied to patients on ventilators in intensive care. Over the next couple of years, more in vitro studies will be conducted to confirm the clinical application of this technology as well as the possible extension of this research to other situations like cardiac arrest and severe bleeding.
The goal of this research, as stated by Dr. Kheir, is to provide an off-the-shelf solution to this common problem of oxygen deprivation when dealing with emergency situations in hospitals. I, for one, am hopeful that this researcher’s technology comes to fruition soon considering the drastic changes it will make in almost every major health care system in the world.
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