I’ve been getting hits on my post Methane mythbusting: does methane cause smelly farts? from Google searches like “can you insides explode”. So by popular demand, here’s Part 2 with the answer to the burning question: can methane make your intestine explode?
This all started when I was searching Pubmed (which is like Google for biomedical science) and I put in a totally mundane search term: ‘methane colonoscopy’. That might not be a normal day in the office for most people, but I do research in gastroenterology, and methane is one of the gases we detect during breath testing.
I was just trying to find out about something boring, like articles on how and where methane is produce in the colon, so I was a bit surprised to see as my fourth search result an article called:
followed by more articles
Colonic explosion during endoscopic polypectomy: avoidable complication or bad luck?
Methane gas explosion during colonoscopy.
It’s not just one freak accident – there are lots of articles on this problem. The funniness of it is tempered by the fact that reading the papers I found out that people have actually died from this.
Colonoscopies investigate problems in the large intestine/colon
So how does it happen? There are three necessary ingredients:
- My old friends hydrogen and methane that are produced when bacteria in the large intestine ferment unabsorbed carbohydrates (to be strictly correct, archaea, not bacteria, in the case of methanogens). These are combustible gases.
- The presence of a combustive gas, ie. oxygen
- A heat source to ignite the explosive mix, in this case electrocautery or argon plasma coagulation, which are used for cauterisation and to stop bleeding.
And the next thing you know, your intestine is going up like the Hindenburg airship or a Japanese nuclear power plant.
The reason people safely undergo colonoscopies all the time without exploding is because patients have to take purgatives or enemas beforehand to clear out their colon.
Noby
31/05/2011
Ha amazing!
Tweeting as we speak!