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Heliox is a breathing gas mixture of helium (He) and oxygen (O 2).It is used as a medical treatment for patients with difficulty breathing because this mixture generates less resistance than atmospheric air when passing through the airways of the lungs, and thus requires less effort by a patient to breathe in and out of the lungs.
The dry air on the Earth we inhale consists of 78.8% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen and 0.93% argon. Heliox therapy is substitution of nitrogen with helium. Helium itself has no pharmacological value, it does not react in the body. Its only purpose is to make the flow less turbulent and help oxygen to get into the lungs.
The normal relaxed state of the lung and chest is partially empty. Further exhalation requires muscular work. Inhalation is an active process requiring work. [4] Some of this work is to overcome frictional resistance to flow, and part is used to deform elastic tissues, and is stored as potential energy, which is recovered during the passive process of exhalation, Tidal breathing is breathing ...
Inhaled air is by volume 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen and small amounts of other gases including argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium, and hydrogen. [18] The gas exhaled is 4% to 5% by volume of carbon dioxide, about a hundredfold increase over the inhaled amount. The volume of oxygen is reduced by about a quarter, 4% to 5%, of total air volume.
Helium can be inhaled to give the voice a reedy, duck-like quality, but this can be dangerous as the gas is an asphyxiant and displaces the oxygen needed for normal respiration. [ 2 ] Various illegal gaseous, vapourised or aerosolized recreational drugs exist, and are classed as inhalants .
The body can compensate to some extent by increasing the volume of inspired gas, but this also increases work of breathing, and is only effective when the ratio of dead space to tidal volume is reduced sufficiently to compensate for the additional carbon dioxide load due to the increased work of breathing.
It is used with patients with neuromuscular disease and muscle weakness due to central nervous system injury. [4] Glossopharyngeal insufflation is a breathing technique that consists of gulping boluses of air into the lungs. It is also used by breath-hold divers to increase their lung volumes. [5]
The helium dilution technique is the way of measuring the functional residual capacity of the lungs (the volume left in the lungs after normal expiration). This technique is a closed-circuit system where a spirometer is filled with a mixture of helium (He) and oxygen. The amount of He in the spirometer is known at the beginning of the test ...