Word: oxygenate
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Logically, and medically, patients who need transfusions - those with low blood counts - should benefit immediately from a transfusion of new oxygen-laden red blood cells. Yet many get sicker. Puzzled by the paradox, Stamler and his colleagues decided to look more closely at banked blood - to figure out whether it underwent certain changes that turned it from life-saving in the donor to potentially deadly...
Their finding, reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: nitric oxide (NO). A workhorse of the blood, the gas helps red blood cells ferry oxygen to tissues and props open tiny vessels to allow freer blood flow. It turns out that within hours of leaving the body, levels of nitric oxide in the blood begin to drop, until, by the time donated blood expires after 42 days, the gas is almost nonexistent. "The reality is that we are giving blood that cannot deliver oxygen properly," says Stamler, lead author of the study. "Many patients...
Previous trials have shown that heart disease patients, for example, who receive a blood transfusion to help restore oxygen to deprived tissues, have a 25% chance of having a heart attack and an 8% chance of dying within 30 days; similar patients who do not get transfused have an 8% chance of a cardiac event and a 3% chance of death. Stamler hypothesizes that without NO, red blood cells cannot drill their way into tiny blood vessels; rather, they pile up in narrow passageways, blocking blood flow instead of increasing it and hampering the heart...
...experiences in layman's terms [Sept. 10]. I had a cardiac arrest in 2003 and was resuscitated by well-trained paramedics. I did not have a near-death experience, just the total blankness of a deep sleep. I believe NDEs are caused by malfunctions of consciousness arising from an oxygen-starved brain. The forms NDEs take are influenced by culture and by religious beliefs. I don't think any non-Christian, for example, would see a tunnel lit by brilliant white light and a Christ-like figure in a white robe. George Varghese, Nairne, South Australia...
...Onstage he connected viscerally with audiences. Taking his bows, he spread wide his enormous stevedore arms in a gesture of embrace, often flaunting a trademark white handkerchief that was approximately the size of Rhode Island. As applause cascaded over him, he visibly inhaled it like life-giving oxygen, which it was to him. "I am enthusiastic of the job I do and enthusiastic of life," he once said. "The pleasure of the profession is the human warmth around me, the public out there...