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Well-Known Member
It ranks among the great medical mysteries of our time, baffling the brightest brains and confounding the curious.
But a concerted effort from an international consortium involving researchers from Canada, France and Japan, believes it may have finally unravelled the riddle of the human hiccup.
In a report published this month in the journal BioEssays, the researchers propose that the hiccup is an evolutionary leftover -- a mechanism that allowed our ancient ancestors to breathe both water and air.
They have found striking similarities between hiccupping and the gill movements of tadpoles, and suggest there's a good reason why this physiological souvenir has survived to irritate modern-day humans 370 million years after our predecessors slithered out of the primordial soup.
"If it doesn't serve some kind of purpose, it's not likely to last through thousands of years of evolution," said co-author and respiralogist William Whitelaw, a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary.
Dr. Whitelaw and his colleagues suggest that hiccups have remained with us as a tool to train our motor systems for suckling.
Hiccups are a sudden, involuntary contraction of the diaphragm that trigger the glottis, or space between the vocal cords, to snap quickly shut, producing the trademark "hic" sound.
Hiccup bouts usually last a few minutes and the causes are almost never obvious.
But Dr. Whitelaw notes they help clear the stomach of air and seal off the stomach and lungs to prevent any unwanted substance from flowing in.
Researchers speculate, for example, that the prenatal hiccup prevents amnionic fluid from entering the lungs, just as it once enabled our primitive forefathers to keep from drowning.
Dr. Whitelaw first became interested in the significance of hiccups when he was working in Paris in 1991 and encountered an actual hiccup clinic, where doctors saw a few patients who had battled hiccups for 20 years.
In the course of his experience there, Dr. Whitelaw learned that a range of vertebrates all over the planet are vulnerable to the jolting inhalation spasms.
Then, Christian Straus, a researcher at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, who had been studying the development of respiratory systems in tadpoles, noted the similarities between breathing in these early-stage frogs and hiccuping.
http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/...HICCN/national/national/national_temp/1/1/23/
But a concerted effort from an international consortium involving researchers from Canada, France and Japan, believes it may have finally unravelled the riddle of the human hiccup.
In a report published this month in the journal BioEssays, the researchers propose that the hiccup is an evolutionary leftover -- a mechanism that allowed our ancient ancestors to breathe both water and air.
They have found striking similarities between hiccupping and the gill movements of tadpoles, and suggest there's a good reason why this physiological souvenir has survived to irritate modern-day humans 370 million years after our predecessors slithered out of the primordial soup.
"If it doesn't serve some kind of purpose, it's not likely to last through thousands of years of evolution," said co-author and respiralogist William Whitelaw, a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary.
Dr. Whitelaw and his colleagues suggest that hiccups have remained with us as a tool to train our motor systems for suckling.
Hiccups are a sudden, involuntary contraction of the diaphragm that trigger the glottis, or space between the vocal cords, to snap quickly shut, producing the trademark "hic" sound.
Hiccup bouts usually last a few minutes and the causes are almost never obvious.
But Dr. Whitelaw notes they help clear the stomach of air and seal off the stomach and lungs to prevent any unwanted substance from flowing in.
Researchers speculate, for example, that the prenatal hiccup prevents amnionic fluid from entering the lungs, just as it once enabled our primitive forefathers to keep from drowning.
Dr. Whitelaw first became interested in the significance of hiccups when he was working in Paris in 1991 and encountered an actual hiccup clinic, where doctors saw a few patients who had battled hiccups for 20 years.
In the course of his experience there, Dr. Whitelaw learned that a range of vertebrates all over the planet are vulnerable to the jolting inhalation spasms.
Then, Christian Straus, a researcher at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, who had been studying the development of respiratory systems in tadpoles, noted the similarities between breathing in these early-stage frogs and hiccuping.
http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/...HICCN/national/national/national_temp/1/1/23/
