|
 “If you’ve ever tried to start a campfire, you always start with
some dry little twigs and once that starts - and that’s kind of the
mustache - then that oxygen tubing lights on fire, it’s like a blow
torch shooting up their nose,” said Dr. Andrew Greenlund of the Mayo
Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “So, if we can prevent it, it would
be good.”
People with lung conditions that impair their ability to get enough
oxygen from normal air may use home oxygen therapy, which delivers a
steady stream of oxygen-rich air from a portable metal tank through
tubing that fits into the nostrils.
After noticing that three of his patients, all with mustaches, had
suffered facial burns while using their home oxygen therapy,
Greenlund and his team decided to investigate.
“We looked through all the literature out there in the last 20 years
and no one had noted that more people with facial hair and home
oxygen were having burns than people without facial hair,” he told
Reuters Health.
Narrowing their search to their own institution, the doctors
identified nine patients who had suffered home oxygen
therapy-related burns and eight of those men had mustaches.
Greenlund said that NASA has demonstrated how flammable human hair
is under normal conditions and how it ignites much more readily in
the presence of higher oxygen concentrations. But no one had looked
at the issue in the context of home oxygen therapy.
To test their theory that facial hair places oxygen therapy users at
a higher risk for burns, the researchers set up mannequins with and
without human hair mustaches, outfitted them with the nasal tubing
and exposed them to a spark.
The tubing on the mustached models ignited while those without
mustaches did not, suggesting that concentrated oxygen together with
kindling in the form of facial hair is a dangerously flammable
combination.
According to the report published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 1.5
million people in the United States use home-oxygen therapy, and
worldwide the numbers are growing as smoking rates increase, leading
to lung disease.
[to top of second column] |
“Since you can modify that risk by getting rid of the facial hair it
seemed like a reasonable thing to look into to decrease the risk of
the burns,” Greenlund said.
The American Thoracic Society advises persons using home oxygen
therapy to keep the tubing as well as the oxygen tank at least six
feet away from an open flame, and to never smoke while using the
device.
The poly-vinyl tubing that patients use is extremely flammable, said
Greenlund, so avoiding sparks is key. He noted that most of the
patients who suffered burns were grinding metal at the time, which
could have been a source of sparks.
“The best thing to do if your tubing catches on fire is to get it
off quickly,” he added.
He thinks that another solution might be to change the material that
the tubing is made of so that it doesn’t burn as easily.
If culture and religion allow, then shaving facial hair would be the
number one preventive measure to take, Greenlund advises. But if a
man decides to keep his facial hair, then using water-based hair
products and avoiding those that are alcohol- or oil-based could
also help reduce the risk.
He pointed out that while the degree of the burns varies, they can
be very serious and a few of the individuals who suffered facial
burns had to be put on a ventilator as their burns healed.
“One of my patients said it was like looking hell in the face, so it
can be pretty traumatic and it’s life-threatening,” he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1kdZCWs Mayo Clinic Proceedings, online June
22, 2014.
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
