Cognitive Function & Aging: After a stroke, many people have trouble with memory, focus and clear thinking. Doctors call this vascular cognitive impairment (VCI): thinking problems caused by damaged or reduced blood flow to the brain. It affects up to 60% of stroke survivors in the first year, and its most severe form, vascular dementia, is the second most common type of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease. “In this study, 72 stroke survivors all received standard stroke rehab. Some also got hyperbaric oxygen, some got a magnetic brain-stimulation treatment called TMS, some got both, and some got rehab alone. The oxygen course was 15 sessions: one hour of pure oxygen at 2.0 ATA, five days a week for three weeks. The TMS was a 20-minute daily session aimed at the brain’s planning-and-focus area. Oxygen alone improved memory and thinking scores a little more than rehab alone. Adding TMS to the oxygen roughly doubled the improvement, and only the combination was clearly better than every other group.” <view study> Read Less

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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is far more common than most people realize — millions of Americans live with the aftereffects of concussions and head injuries, and for a large share of them the symptoms never fully go away. These “persistent post-concussion” problems (headaches, brain fog, poor sleep, anxiety, dizziness, loss of smell) can quietly derail careers, relationships, and independence for years, and they carry an enormous societal and financial cost in lost productivity and ongoing care. What makes this study important is that it tackled these lingering symptoms head-on with a rigorous design. In a double-blind randomized trial, 47 people (40 with TBI) received either 40 real HBOT sessions at 1.5 ATA over 12 weeks or 40 sham sessions. The HBOT group improved almost three times as much on a standard neurobehavioral symptom scale (a 10.6-point gain vs. 3.6), with additional benefits for smell, anxiety, sleep, and balance. When participants were later offered a second 40-session course, they improved further at 12 months — leading the authors to suggest that 80 sessions may work even better than 40 for long-term brain-injury recovery. The takeaway for patients: meaningful improvement may be possible even long after the injury, if enough sessions are completed <view study> Read Less

A 61-year-old right-handed male stoke patient was suffering from hemiparesis and physical weakness in the right upper limb for 2 years. He then underwent a course of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for 60 daily sessions at 2.0 ATA. Each session was 90 minutes and included two 5-minute air breaks. Following this simple 3 month course of HBOT, both clinical and objective hand motor improvements were observed and documented though functional brain imaging scans comparing both pre and post HBOT. From the fMRI data collected, researchers of this study were able to conclude that “HBOT induces brain plasticity and functional improvement in chronic post-stroke patients” <view study> Read Less

Management of chronic strokes remains a challenge within our current medical system, yet the intervention of hyperbaric oxygen therapy has consistently been shown to improve stroke recovery, even years after the brain insult. This study followed 4 patients (from 14 months to 15 years post stroke) who were given a typical 8 week hyperbaric protocol consisting of 40 individual sessions (at an effective dosage of 1.8 ATA) and evaluated the outcome measures through functional MRI imaging (fMRI). Note, fMRI is a non invasive, robust and reliable technique to assess and monitor neuronal functional change. The results were very impressive and should give encouragement for this protocol to be more widely used within the stroke recovery community. Here is a summary of all 4 patients along with the details regarding their recovery:

60 year old male (14 month old stroke) with severe, non-fluent aphasia, associated with retained comprehension, dyslexia and dysgraphia, a right upper limb spastic paralysis and a right lower limb paresis, and post-stroke depression.

Results — Aphasia and the ability to speak improved noticeably, helping to regain some social life. Accordingly, the negative attitude was replaced by positivity, good mood and interest. Right lower limb paresis improved with better gait and stance. However, the right hand paralysis did not improve, except for a decrease in spasticity

68 year old male (5 year old stroke) with moderate signs of dysarthria (he sounded clumsy in reading aloud short passages), an unsteady, wide-base gait and dysphagia

Results — A marked clinical improvement in the language fluency, such that he was able to read aloud a written text, without a hitch. Ataxia and dysphagia improved as well

48 year old male (15 year old stroke) with recurrent seizures, mild signs of dysarthria, upper left limb paralysis, lower left limb paresis, lack of coordination in the right limbs, severe in the lower right extremity and to a lesser extent in the upper right extremity

Results — He dramatically improved his speech fluency. The left lower limb paresis improved together with an increase in walking autonomy, but he was still unable to flex and extend the left foot rhythmically. Also the right limbs coordination improved. On the contrary, the left upper limb paralysis did not change at all.

34 year old male (17 month old stroke) with global non fluent aphasia with some deficits in the reading comprehension, a complete spastic hemiplegia of the right upper limb with spastic hypertonia, a partial paresis of the right inferior limb (but he was able to walk with some walking aids) and right hemilateral hypoaesthesia

Results — Good improvement in the common everyday acts of his life, as speaking and understanding and also in walking, but not in his upper limb paralysis

Once again, it is important to keep in mind that fMRI imagining confirmed these benefits and can play a future role in determining hyperbaric-based protocols for chronic stroke sufferers <view study> Read Less