Carbon Dioxide for Breath

Yale's robustious, tweedy Professor Yandell Henderson last week recapitulated his researches on lungs. Because Professor Henderson has emphasized the function of carbon dioxide in breathing, post- operative pneumonia may often be prevented, and newborn infants need no longer die when they cannot cry vigorously enough to ventilate their lungs.

The lungs are a pair of sponges through which oxygen passes from the air into the blood. The oxygen rides with the red cells of the blood through the arteries to every part of the body. Life is a slow, low-burning fire which oxygen keeps going. Product of the combustion is carbon dioxide. The blood, relieved of its oxygen, carries carbon dioxide through the veins back to the lungs. Venous blood is dark red with carbon dioxide; arterial blood is bright red with vigorous oxygen. The lungs inhale oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. The heart is simply an alert pump in this gas exchange system.

The lungs, however, do not exhale all the carbon dioxide in the body. There is normally a residue. That residue of carbon dioxide in the blood is one of the things which, Professor Henderson has demonstrated, the respiratory system absolutely needs to keep the lungs pumping.

The lungs are expanded because the ribs rise & fall and the diaphragm ascends & descends. The muscles which operate the ribs and diaphragm are controlled, through the agency of nerves, by the respiratory centre in the lower brain, which needs carbon dioxide for stimulation. (Infantile paralysis often injures the spinal cord nerves which go to muscles used in respiration. In certain cases the injured nerves may regenerate, while the victim's life is maintained in a respirator.)

Consequences of Professor Henderson's emphasis of the necessity of carbon dioxide in breathing are many. With able Assistant Professor Howard Wilcox Haggard, he has demonstrated them.

Thus, after certain operations (particularly of the abdomen), after anesthesia, asphyxia or apparent drowning, tiny recesses of the lungs may be plugged. The lungs may partially collapse. Secondary pneumonia often results. Carbon dioxide may stimulate the lungs to deep, full inhalation. In fact, wrote Professor Henderson in the Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine, "It appears that this is probably a specific treatment against all secondary pneumonia."

Thorough ventilation by means of carbon dioxide sustains the system until the effects of carbon monoxide wear off. Narcotics like morphine depress respiration.

The saving of newborn lives is a beneficence for which Professor Hender son takes great kudos. Wrote he: ''A large per cent of the deaths of newborn babies are caused by pneumonia developing in undilated areas of the lungs, scientists have learned. The lungs are not fully dilated by the first cry, or for many hours or even days after birth. The ancient practice of making a child cry several times a day is often ineffective in over coming atelectasis (imperfect expansion of the lungs at birth). The old barbarous and often ineffective methods of resuscitating the newborn by swinging, spanking and dipping in cold water are being replaced by inhalation of carbon dioxide. Many babies that cannot be resuscitated in any other way are thus saved. In maternity hospitals, where this measure has been adopted for those who breathe poorly, [infant] mortality from pneumonia has ceased."

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