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Researchers in Canada have found that hyperventilation can significantly increase the rate at which the body metabolizes alcohol, in a breakthrough that could save thousands of lives.
Three million people worldwide die each year from alcohol-related deaths, and emergency room physicians have few effective tools to treat acute alcohol poisoning.
In a proof-of-concept paper published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, a group of Toronto researchers describe how hyperventilation in a device that regulates carbon dioxide levels can remove alcohol much faster than conventional treatments.
The device is the size of a briefcase and delivers carbon dioxide to users from a tank, ensuring that the CO2 blood levels remain constant, thus avoiding dizziness and nausea during hyperventilation.
Lead researcher Joseph Fisher, an anesthetist and lead scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, said hospitals are often defenseless in cases of alcohol poisoning. Currently, the only intervention to remove excess ethanol from the body is through dialysis, a largely ineffective process.
“[Patients] they are arriving unconscious and very intoxicated by alcohol, so they are difficult to examine … And there is nothing I can do. You have to wait until their livers metabolize it, ”Fisher told the Canadian Press.
Assuming that the lungs could play a key role in removing ethanol, the team had a group of five adults drink half a glass of vodka twice.
After the first drink, it took the participants between two and three hours to remove half of the ethanol from their body, according to the Breathalyzer results. The second time, they were instructed to hyperventilate. With each exhalation, Fisher says, alcohol is released that has evaporated from the blood.
The body was able to metabolize ethanol at a rate three times faster than waiting for the liver to process it. Fisher cautions that the sample is small and requires more testing.
Nonetheless, the peer-reviewed developments are promising.
“I used to be an emergency doctor and I know they have big problems with patients who, in addition to everything else, are also intoxicated by alcohol,” Fisher said, adding that it could also save the lives of young children who ingest alcohol accidentally. . “Usually those kids are out of place, but this can be an approach.”
The treatment is unlikely to be repackaged as a hangover cure – the researchers found the process to be most effective for high levels of intoxication.
