this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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It hurts me. (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Wait, is this real? The summary makes it sound like carbon monoxide, in small doses, is actually a good thing and necessary for our bodies. Is that true? Is it possible for someone to die from an internal CO build-up as a result of an overactive metabolism or something?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

In chemistry, you'll find the dose is the most important factor. Also, I don't think it would be possible to super saturate your body with carbon dioxide or monoxide even if you purposely ingested something and then reacted it to break it down into those gases internally. I'm certain you would increase the concentration in your blood, but your lungs have far more surface area and tissue dedicated to gas exchange then your guts do. You would probably have terrible bouts of gas from both ends though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Isn't one of the main issues with carbon-monoxide that hemoglobin preferentially binds with it over oxygen, and so it doesn't get expelled from your bloodstream via your lungs? You can tolerate quite large doses with little more than a headache, so I doubt you could overdose from internally generated amounts, but a large enough dose dangerously reduces your blood's oxygen carrying capacity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yep! The LD50 is 12.5% in air (higher than I thought, honestly) and yes the issue is that it binds preferentially to hemoglobin.

The main treatment for sub-lethal exposure is just supplying pure oxygen to kick the equilibrium the other way and slowly remove the CO from your system. It won't all come off, but your body recycles red blood cells pretty quickly, so you're back on your feet within a few hours and back to normal within a few days. However, there's no treatment for lethal doses, people have proposed using things like cobalt porphyrins (which bind CO even better than iron hemes) to more quickly sequester the CO from your hemoglobin, but that's not been trialled yet in humans.

I wasnt aware of its use as a neurotransmitter (but I'm absolutely going to look into it now), but its barely soluble in water so there must be more going on there. just like urea, it's a natural waste product, and typically one your body wants to get rid of reasonably quickly.

Edit: from a chemical perspective, NO and CO "look" electronically similar to a NO-binding protein, so I expect most of these effects of CO are actually just it activating pathways natively activated by NO.