Home About Solvent Abuse What is solvent abuse? Butane and other gases. What products contain butane gas? What are the effects of inhaling butane? Is it addictive? Butane can lead to a psychological addiction but it is not physically addictive. What are the health risks of inhaling butane?
Over half of all deaths associated with solvent abuse are due to butane. Butane is highly flammable so there is a high risk of burns or explosions, particularly for smokers.
Some butane users report suffering from slurred speech and slower reactions while they are using, but find that these symptoms do not continue once they stop. Other people feel that butane abuse has contributed to longer-term physical or mental health issues. Avoid spraying directly into the mouth. It is illegal to sell butane to someone you reasonably suspect may be abusing it, but the maximum penalty - pounds 5, per can sold, or six months' jail - is rarely imposed.
The BBC sent a year-old boy into a number of shops in Birmingham to buy cans of butane, and every shop he visited was willing to sell him several cans. One shop sold him In a period when she believed she had come off the gas for good, Jodie said: "I wish I could get through to people [about the dangers of butane]. I'm the lucky one. I'm alive. I have been in hospital so many times because of my breathing I do get chest pains and I do find it hard to breathe.
It will take a long time to heal up - if it does heal up. As soon as I go in a shop, they know exactly what I want. Positive steps are being taken by the companies that sell butane gas and other volatile substances and solvents. The industry funds a charity, Re-Solv, which works to prevent abuse and is calling for a ban on the sale of lighter gas to unders.
Ronson, the leading manufacturer, says it is developing 25ml cans to make it harder to abuse the substance and to obtain a fatal dose. In , the government cut all funding, previously worth pounds 33, a year, to Re-Solv. Requests for new funding have been declined. For Jodie, seen so optimistically at the end of the film telling the camera she is off the gas, these measures may already be too late.
Since the documentary was made, she has become a registered heroin addict. At that time the patient was referred to our facility as a tertiary care health center for higher care. Upon presentation, to our hospital, the patient was vitally stable, confused, having short-term memory loss, ataxia, and disoriented to time and place.
CT brain was repeated and showed no acute brain insult, and blood investigations were overall unremarkable. The patient was assessed by the cardiologist and neurologist in the Emergency Department and the decision was made to admit him under cardiology care in the cardiac care unit CCU for rhythm monitoring and further workup.
The next day the neurology team performed a detailed neurological examination which showed the above-witnessed disorientation for time and place, short-term memory loss, and ataxia. At that time magnetic resonance imaging MRI and electroencephalogram EEG were ordered to rule out hypoxic brain injury vs.
By the fourth day in his hospital course, the patient improved, was conscious, oriented, and regained memory. He started mobilizing out of the bed with walking aid. No cardiac or neurological events were recorded during his hospital stay so he was discharged home with followup appointments for magnetic resonance imaging MRI and electroencephalogram EEG brain with neurology clinic.
We present this case of butane inhalation out of pocket lighter gas for a young boy. Butane gas is volatile and quickly caused hypoxia, which is linked to causing cardiac tachyarrhythmias. It is also highly lipophilic which eases its crossing of the brain and cardiac tissue causing neurological deficit or cardiac arrhythmias.
Published literature shows that these patients die of ventricular fibrillation or live with bad neurological outcomes due to the delay in resuscitation or unrecognition of the cause. Our patient was lucky to survive from this tragic event which may be due to the rapid initiation of resuscitation procedure. Butane gas inhalation is linked with serious tragic outcomes ranging from transient cardiac arrhythmias to complete cardiac arrests and also involves multiple neurological outcomes. The public population must be educated about the dangers of this gas and its bad outcomes and should be recommended to stay away from it.
AlRabiah et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Article of the Year Award: Outstanding research contributions of , as selected by our Chief Editors. Read the winning articles. Journal overview. AlRabiah, 1 Abdulmalik M.
AlShamrani, 2 and Afnan A. Academic Editor: Vasileios Papadopoulos. Received 25 Mar Revised 20 May Accepted 25 May
0コメント