40 Fun Facts About Respiratory Therapy

Which machine did Texas attorney Paul Alexander rely on for almost 72 years after childhood polio?

An iron lung breathed for Alexander from 1952, the longest anyone has spent in one. He taught himself to gulp air so he could leave it for growing spells, and went on to work as an attorney.

Which CPR training manikin has a face copied from the death mask of a girl reputedly drowned in the Seine?

Resusci Anne was unveiled in Norway in 1960 by toymaker Åsmund Laerdal. The mask she borrows is known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, the unknown woman of the Seine.

Which gas is mixed with oxygen to help patients breathe through dangerously narrowed airways?

Helium is so much less dense than air that the blend, called heliox, meets less resistance in tight airways and takes less effort to breathe. Hospitals have used it since the 1930s.

Which small birds did physiologist John Scott Haldane send down British mines in the 1890s to warn of deadly gas?

Canaries were in use by 1896, a year after Haldane proposed warm-blooded animals as living alarms. British pits kept the birds until electronic detectors replaced them in 1986.

Which US president's premature son Patrick died of a lung disorder in 1963, spurring research into newborn care?

John F. Kennedy lost Patrick after just 39 hours to hyaline membrane disease, now called infant respiratory distress syndrome. The death put the condition in the public eye.

Which fingertip device, developed by Japanese engineer Takuo Aoyagi, reads blood oxygen with red and infrared light?

The pulse oximeter compares how much of each color pulsing blood absorbs, since oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood differ. Aoyagi's employer, Nihon Kohden, applied for the patent in 1974.

In which European capital did 200 medical students hand-pump air into polio patients during a 1952 epidemic?

Copenhagen anesthesiologist Bjørn Ibsen organized the effort for patients whose breathing muscles were paralyzed. A year later he opened the world's first intensive care unit in the city.

Which gas building up in the blood, rather than a shortage of oxygen, triggers the urge to breathe?

Carbon dioxide irritates the brain's respiratory center as it accumulates, which is why most untrained people can hold a breath for only a minute or two.

Which asthma device, first developed in 1955, borrowed a valve originally designed for dispensing perfume?

The metered-dose inhaler came from Riker Laboratories, which paired the perfume valve with a propellant. Its first two products carried epinephrine and isoprenaline.

Which American singer was left blind after an oxygen-rich hospital incubator damaged his eyes as a premature baby?

Stevie Wonder was born six weeks early and developed retinopathy of prematurity, a disease in which the retinas often detach.

Which nighttime disorder was Australian physician Colin Sullivan treating when he invented the CPAP machine in 1980?

Sleep apnea patients at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital got the first machines, which Sullivan helped build by hand. He published the design in The Lancet in 1981.

Which American aviator invented the Mark 7, a small green box sold as the first mass-produced ventilator?

Forrest Bird began with an oxygen regulator he found in a crashed German bomber and improved at home. Hospital patients came to know his respirator simply by his surname.

Which soapy lung-lining substance do very premature babies lack, leaving their air sacs prone to collapse?

Surfactant lowers surface tension so the sacs stay open at the end of each breath out. A full-term newborn stores roughly twenty times as much per kilogram as a preterm one.

Which medical instrument did French doctor René Laennec invent in 1816 after rolling paper into a tube?

The stethoscope owed something to Laennec's hobby of carving his own wooden flutes. He found the tube worked better than pressing an ear to the chest, especially on heavier patients.

Which childhood infection is known for a barking cough often likened to the call of a sea lion?

Croup swells the inside of the windpipe, which also brings a hoarse voice and a harsh noise on breathing in. It is usually caused by a virus and tends to worsen at night.

Which inherited disease, diagnosed with a test for unusually salty sweat, clogs the lungs with thick mucus?

Cystic fibrosis stems from a faulty CFTR protein, which normally keeps secretions thin. Parents sometimes notice the salt first, as a taste when they kiss their child.

Which anesthesiologist devised the five-part score that rates a newborn's breathing one minute after birth?

Virginia Apgar wanted a standard way to judge which newborns needed help breathing, and presented her score in 1952. The other four signs are skin color, heart rate, reflexes and muscle tone.

Which Superman actor depended on a ventilator after a 1995 riding accident paralyzed him from the neck down?

Christopher Reeve was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition. In the first months afterward he relied on the machine for every breath.

Which disease's bacterium did Robert Koch identify on 24 March 1882, now the date of its annual World Day?

Tuberculosis also handed Koch a failure: his 1890 remedy, tuberculin, did not cure the disease, though it was later adapted into a screening test.

Which sign of low blood oxygen shows best on thin skin such as the lips, nail beds and ear lobes?

Cyanosis is a bluish-purple tint that appears when less oxygen is bound to hemoglobin. Blue food dyes and large birthmarks can be mistaken for it.

Which lung-testing instrument did English surgeon John Hutchinson invent while assessing candidates for life insurance?

The spirometer let Hutchinson measure thousands of people in the 1840s and show that lung capacity rises with height and falls with age. He also coined the term vital capacity.

Which rescue-inhaler drug was launched in Britain in 1969 under the brand name Ventolin?

Albuterol is the American name for salbutamol, discovered in 1966 by a team under David Jack in Hertfordshire, England. It opens the medium and large airways of the lungs.

Which airway operation in 1985 cost physicist Stephen Hawking what remained of his natural speech?

A tracheotomy opens a direct airway to the windpipe through a cut in the front of the neck. Afterward Hawking needed round-the-clock nursing, split across three shifts a day.

Which odorless gas grips hemoglobin about 240 times more strongly than oxygen does, starving the body's tissues?

Carbon monoxide poisoning can be treated in a pressure chamber: oxygen at three times normal pressure cuts the gas's half-life in the blood to about 23 minutes.

Which lung infection did physician William Osler describe as the friend of the aged?

Pneumonia earned the nickname because it tended to take the elderly in a short and seldom painful illness, sparing them a slower decline.

Which term names the roughly 500 millilitres of air a resting adult moves with each ordinary breath?

Tidal volume works out at about 7 millilitres per kilogram of body mass. A ventilator set to deliver very large breaths can injure the lungs.

Which gas did Humphry Davy inhale in experiments at Bristol's Pneumatic Institution and nickname for its giddy effects?

Nitrous oxide, his laughing gas, struck Davy as a possible way to relieve pain during surgery. Thomas Beddoes had founded the Bristol clinic to study the medical effects of newly found gases.

Which divers' illness, nicknamed the bends, is treated with oxygen inside a hyperbaric recompression chamber?

Decompression sickness strikes when dissolved gases come out of solution as bubbles in the tissues. Bubbles settling in the joints made sufferers double over in pain, hence the nickname.

Which French chemist named oxygen in the 1770s from Greek words meaning acid former?

Antoine Lavoisier chose the name because he wrongly believed the gas was a part of every acid. He had been calling it vital air.

From which artery is blood usually drawn for an arterial blood gas test, after an Allen's test of the hand?

The radial artery at the wrist is easy to reach, can be compressed to control bleeding and carries less risk of a blockage. The femoral artery in the groin is a fallback.

Which form of COPD gave patients the old nickname pink puffers, for their flushed skin and pursed-lip breathing?

Emphysema types kept a pink complexion while breathing fast through pursed lips. Their chronic bronchitic counterparts were called blue bloaters, for bluish lips and swollen ankles.

Which older name for the respiratory care profession stayed in its American association's title until 1973?

Inhalation therapy named the Inhalation Therapy Association, formed in Chicago in the 1940s. The group swapped the word for respiratory in 1973 and is now the American Association for Respiratory Care.

Which lung illness is named after a 1976 outbreak at a veterans' convention in Philadelphia?

Legionnaires' disease spreads through mist from contaminated water, such as hot tubs and the cooling towers of large air conditioners, and not from person to person.

Which life-support machine pumps blood out through an artificial lung when a patient's own lungs cannot cope?

ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation: blood drained from a vein is oxygenated outside the body and returned. It can support a failing heart as well as the lungs.

In which position are ventilated patients with severe ARDS often placed to improve their oxygen levels?

Face down, or prone, positioning may raise oxygen levels by reopening collapsed parts of the lung and improving blood flow through them.

In the lung-function measure FEV1, what does the 1 stand for in a patient's forced breath out?

One second is the window: FEV1 is the amount of air a person can blow out in the first second after breathing in fully. Other timed versions run to two and three seconds.

Which asthma drug, first extracted from tea leaves around 1888, takes its name from the old genus name for tea?

Theophylline was identified by the German biologist Albrecht Kossel, and traces of it also occur in coffee, chocolate and yerba mate.

Which deep, labored breathing pattern of diabetic ketoacidosis is named after a 19th-century German physician?

Kussmaul respiration is the body's attempt to offset acid building up in the blood. Adolf Kussmaul first noted it among patients with advanced diabetes.

The hand-squeezed resuscitation bag devised in 1956 by Holger Hesse and Henning Ruben is known by which maker's name?

Ambu is the name Hesse's company later took, and it has made the self-inflating bag since 1956. The idea grew out of the pair's earlier work on a suction pump.

Which Italian physicist's name is on the air-entrainment mask that delivers a precise, fixed concentration of oxygen?

Giovanni Venturi published the effect behind it in 1797. Physician Moran Campbell devised the mask to replace on-and-off oxygen treatment with a steady, known amount.