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Topics: Science, Sex and Relationships
Lucy Devine
A new study has shown how choking during sex could lead to brain damage.
Also known as 'sexual strangulation', new research indicates that being choked during sex has been experienced by 58 per cent of female college students.
But while some might think the act is harmless, research has shown the potentially devastating impact it can have.
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The study - carried out by sexual and reproductive health researcher, Dr. Debby Herbinick - found that women who had been choked four times in the last 30 days experienced cognitive changes which impacted their memory.
The study explains: "While unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections remain important public health issues, recent studies identified that sexual choking/strangulation or choking a partner during sex, which is a form of manual or ligature strangulation, has become prevalent among adolescents and young adults, disproportionally affecting women."
The risk of choking lies in the dangers associated with starving the brain of oxygen.
Being without oxygen for as little as 10 seconds can cause a person to pass out, while spending minutes without oxygen can lead to brain damage.
It's thought that people engage in choking during sex due to the 'pleasant or euphoric feeling' resulting from the return of blood flow and oxygen to the brain after the choking ceases.
The study, published in Brain Behaviour, compared two groups of women. The first group consisted of women who had been choked within the last month, and a second group that hadn't experienced choking at all.
Researchers explain that in the choking group, there was increased cortical thickness in a number of brain regions.
"In our choking group, we observed significant increases in cortical thickness in the areas that are important for visual processing, working memory, language, object recognition and motor control," they explained.
"...In the context of sexual choking, hypoxemia/ischemia‐induced reactive gliosis or astrocyte activation may be one of the main reasons for increased cortical thickness."
The study noted the importance of the findings, explaining that "choking during sex is the most common form of strangulation, and thus our findings have high public health significance."
Dr Herbernick said: "There’s big concern about teenagers and young people doing this, who don't really yet have full knowledge and information about these behaviors, who maybe have very limited practice or experiencing or experience communicating about sexuality.
"Even historically, in kink and BDSM communities, strangulation, which is what choking really is, has been off limits for most and seen as a really sort of rare or niche behavior that a small subset of people were interested in, and that they needed very careful consent, communication, education."
Back in 2021, UK woman Sophie Moss was killed after partner Sam Pybus 'applied pressure to her neck' during sex.
Pybus was jailed for four years and eight months.
The judge told Pybus: "This was a case in which you were voluntarily intoxicated, unable to judge the situation and perhaps to have stopped when it was obvious that you had gone too far.
"It was obviously dangerous conduct, whether consensual or otherwise.
"Dangerous in the sense that any compression of the neck creates an obvious risk of brain damage or worse as this case so tragically demonstrates."