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When you’ve ingested a massive dose of alcohol, you usually can’t do much other than wait for the liver to flush out the excess ethanol, hoping to avoid an alcoholic coma. However, a new method based on hyperventilation could allow alcohol to evacuate from the lungs three times faster.
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[EN VIDÉO] How fast is alcohol eliminated? From the digestive tract, alcohol passes very quickly into the blood, from where it quickly reaches the brain, with the effects we know. The body will then metabolize ethanol to feed on it. But this phenomenon is much slower …
When we drinks a lot d ‘alcohol in no time, the foie has difficulty in eliminating excess and the level of alcohol in the blood increases significantly. Generally, blood alcohol levels peak in 30 minutes on an empty stomach and in one hour with a meal. The blood alcohol level decreases hence from 0.1g to 0.15g per hour depending on the individual, and there is little means to do so speed up the process. But while the liver does most of the work, even a small portion of the alcohol is eliminated from lungs, which we can notice, for example, when we breathe the breath of people who have drunk too much. When alcohol saturated blood enters the lungs to supply themoxygen, the alcohol is then evacuated at the same time as the carbon dioxide.
Hyperventilation to exhale blood alcohol
It is this mechanism that Canadian researchers exploited who invented a special mask that promotes the elimination of alcohol thanks to hyperventilation. The faster we breathe, the more effectively the body will eliminate carbon dioxide and therefore the continuous alcohol in the blood.
The problem is that by removing too much CO2 at the same time, hyperventilation leads to hypocapnia (decrease pressure of carbon dioxide in the blood) which has unfortunate consequences: dyspnea, tremors, dizziness, restlessness, heart palpitations, even loss of consciousness and tetany. The mask, developed by anesthetist Joseph Fisher and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, allows you to initiate hyperventilation while providing a supply of oxygen and carbon dioxide to restore the gas balance in the blood.
” With each aspiration, the mask supplies carbon dioxide and the excess is released during the next exhalation, describes Joseph Fisher. All this is done in a simple way by a mechanical valve, therefore in an infallible way, and without resorting to electronics, filters or computers. “. The mask was tested on five volunteers, who absorbed a” moderate “dose of alcohol (generally a cocktail of 250 ml of 80 ° vodka diluted in 500 ml of water) in order to increase their alcohol level by 0. in the blood, 1%. The blood alcohol level was measured after the natural alcohol removal process and with the use of the mask for half an hour after theingestion. According to the results of the study published in the journal Scientific reports, the mask allows you to reduce the alcohol level three times faster than without protocol specific.
Treatment of acute alcohol poisoning
Originally developed for treatment carbon monoxide poisoning, the mask called ClearMate and developed by to boot Thornhill Medical (University of Toronto spin-off) received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in March 2019. According to Joseph Fisher, the device could easily be adapted to severe alcohol intoxication, or even to alcoholic coma in which the patient is already unconscious. In this case, it would be intubated directly into the lungs, using a self-inflating bag to produce manual breathing.
” In view of the 40-minute semi-elimination time observed in this study, it can be expected that much less time would be required to reduce the blood alcohol level below a lethal range. “, Says the study. Remember, however, that heavy or moderate alcohol ingestion is dangerous to health and damage the liver, regardless of the means used to remove excess.
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