Here’s one type of breathing that you could eventually get behind, so to speak—a way to essentially breathe through your butt. It would involve squirting an oxygen-carrying liquid up your butt to then deliver oxygen to your bloodstream and thus your entire body. This could be a valuable alternative way to breathe when your respiratory tract and lungs can’t do the job. This method still needs buttloads of testing, though, before it can be available in clinics and hospitals. But a new publication in the journal Med showed how important progress has been made.
The Study Suggests That Injecting Perfluorodecalin Up Your Butt Is Safe
The Med publication detailed the latest testing of perfluorodecalin, a fluid that could be used to carry the oxygen. It was a Phase 1 clinical study that had a number of butts on the line, 27 to be exact. These were the butts of 27 healthy adult male participants, who ranged in age from 20 to 45 years.
The team that conducted this study hailed from the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine (Tasuku Fujii), the Institute of Science Tokyo (Yasuyuki Kurihara and Takanori Takebe), Nemoto Science Co. Ltd (Yoshihiko Tagawa) and EVA Therapeutics, Inc. (Hirofumi Nagai, Chihiro Yokota and Hiroyuki Mizu). Takebe co-founded EVA with the aim of eventually commercializing this bottom-breathing procedure.
Each study participant got a single dose of non-oxygenated perfluorodecalin injected into his rectum. Once the liquid was there, the study participant had to, in the words of Wilson Phillips, hold on for just one hour. In the meantime, the researchers monitored how the participant was doing.
The primary purpose of this study was to get to the bottom of whether such an injection would be safe and tolerable. Although the perfluorodecalin did not contain oxygen and therefore the study could not assess how well the substance could transfer oxygen into the study participant, this study was nonetheless an important step. After all, if someone said, “Let’s inject something up your anus,” you wouldn’t just space out and say, “Sure, whatever,” would you? You’d want to make sure that simply getting that substance up there and holding it for a while would be possible and not cause any problems.
In general, the participants seemed to go with the flow, the flow of the liquid from the injection device up there. Seven of the participants ended up not being able to hold the liquid in their rectums for the entire hour. Some of the folks who received larger amounts of the perfluorodecalin, up to 1,500 milliliters, did complain of some abdominal bloating and discomfort, because that’s what can happen when holding a fair amount of liquid in your butt. But in the end, there were no serious adverse events.
Furthermore, checking the participants’ blood also revealed no evidence of perfluorodecalin being absorbed through the rectal wall. In other words, the rectum was a bit like Las Vegas. What happened there, stayed there.
Why Is The Butt May Be A Good Place To Administer Oxygen
Now, you may have heard the saying, “nose so far up one’s butt.” But you still may be wondering why the rectum is being considered as an alternative place to “breathe” and exchange oxygen. Well, your intestines do have a lot of blood vessels running through them and the walls of your intestines are rather thin. These constructs allow nutrients from the food that you eat to readily be absorbed from the inside your intestines into your bloodstream. Why then couldn’t your intestinal walls pass gas like oxygen in a similar manner?
Plus, nature does have a very fishy example of how this might work: an eel-like fish known as the loach. The loach does spend a lot of time and feeds on the bottom, meaning the bottom of freshwater locations like ponds, swamps and rivers. These bottoms may not have a lot of oxygen. So the loach may periodically ascend to the surface of the water to take a big gulp of air. The loach can then hold this air in its gut where oxygen from the air can diffuse into the loach’s body. This offers the loach more oxygen reserves when the water filtered through its gills cannot provide enough of this gas.
All of this gave rise to the idea of enteral ventilation. Enteral is a fancier medical way of saying “of the intestines.” Ventilation, as you may know, is the exchange of air or some kind of gas. That may make enteral ventilation sound like a fancier way of saying fart. But instead it is really the possibility of delivering oxygen to your bloodstream and body via the intestines.
As anyone who has ever gone number two knows, one way to the intestines is through the butt. Therefore, enteral ventilation could entail delivering oxygen through your tail via either some kind of oxygen streaming contraption or some type of oxygen-carrying substance. A number of years ago, Takebe decided to take a crack at the latter approach through the butt, eventually settling on perfluorodecalin as the substance. Eventually, Takebe and his team showed that perfluorodecalin could help rodents and pigs butt breathe and published the results in Med. This publication then earned Takebe one of the Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded on September 12, 2024, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Keep in mind that an Ig Nobel Prize is not exactly the same a Nobel Prize. If the latter is like a luxurious triple chocolate mousse cake, the former is a bit more like a holiday fruitcake. The “Ig” combines with “Nobel” to form something that sounds like “ignoble.” Since 1991, these somewhat satirical prizes have been awarded annually to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” That doesn’t mean, though, that work that’s been honored in this “Ig” way won’t end up having a lot of positive impact.
Why Butt Breathing May Be Needed
Should butt-breathing become a reality, don’t expect many people to tear off their pants and say that they can finally breathe freely. Breathing through the nose and mouth will still be the preferred approach since your upper and lower respiratory tracts are specifically designed for oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange. You could say that your intestines and butt are designed more for a different kind fo gas exchange.
But butt-breathing could be an important option if your respiratory system can’t do what normally is its job. This can be the case if your lungs are infected such as when you have a bad pneumonia, damaged by inhalation of smoke or some other substance or too scarred up from chronic lung disease. Your lungs may not be able to properly exchange gas when they are filled with fluid such as when you are having heart failure. Losing your ability to inhale and exhale such as when you have a stroke or other nueromusclar problems can keep you from getting oxygen into your lungs. Without enough oxygen exchange going on in your lungs, all the cells in your body could be at risk because they kind of need oxygen to survive.
Historically, the standard option to such respiratory failure has been sticking a breathing tube down your throat and hook you up to a ventilator. This is not always feasible and even if it is, staying too long on such a ventilator can damage your respiratory tract and lungs as well. Therefore, another ventilation option could help not only those who can’t have a breathing tube down the trachea but also those whose respiratory tract and lungs need a rest.
The Next Steps For Butt-Breathing
What the research team probably won’t do is give this intrarectal perfluorodecalin administration approach a rest. There’s certainly no iffs, ands or butts about this. As mentioned earlier, Takebe and his colleagues have already demonstrated that such administration can enable butt breathing in rodents and pigs. Computer simulation modeling has shown how this could work in humans as well.
Now that this latest study has shown that humans can tolerate perfluorodecalin up their butts, the next step is to try the oxygenated versions of perfluorodecalin. If the next study can demonstrate that perfluorodecalin up people’s butts can safely and effectively deliver oxygen to their bloodstreams, attempt to get this method to the market shouldn’t be far behind.