And Oxycyte was perfect for the group's efforts to win the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize. The experiments involved the intra-anal administration of oxygen gas or oxygenated liquid perfluorocarbon to unfortunate rodents and pigs. Yes, they gave animals enemas. They then induced respiratory failure and assessed the effectiveness of intraanal treatment. The result: Both treatments were damn effective at preventing respiratory failure without any serious complications.
Photo: Cincinnati Children's/Med.
So far, so good. The next logical step was to determine whether EVA could also work in humans. “Patients with severe respiratory failure often require mechanical ventilation to survive, but these treatments can cause further lung damage,” the authors write in their latest paper. Spacewalking “can give the lungs a chance to rest and recover.”
The team recruited 27 healthy adult men in Japan, who each received a dose of unoxygenated perfluorodecalin through the anus. They were asked to retain the liquid for an hour while the dose was slowly increased from 25 to 1500 ml. Twenty men successfully completed the experiment. Other than mild temporary bloating and discomfort, which appeared to be dose-related and resolved without the need for medical attention, they had no side effects.
“This is the first data in humans, and the results are limited solely to demonstrating the safety of the procedure, not its effectiveness,” said co-author Takanori Takebe Cincinnati Children's Hospital and Osaka University in Japan. “But now that we've established tolerance, the next step is to evaluate how efficient the process of delivering oxygen into the bloodstream is.”
Honey, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/zh.medzh.2025.100887 (About DOI).
