Post Stroke: Recovery with HBOT

Understanding Stroke Recovery: A Breakthrough with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Strokes are widely recognized as one of the most alarming medical conditions, typically categorized into two types: hemorrhagic strokes, caused by bleeding in the brain, and ischemic strokes, resulting from a clot or blockage in an artery. While factors like demographics and family history can offer insights into one's risk, strokes are unpredictable and can strike suddenly. Their impact is almost always life-altering, leaving many victims dependent on ongoing care and support from family members or professional caregivers. Unfortunately, effective treatments or widely adopted therapies for stroke recovery remain scarce. Against this backdrop, the advancement we'll explore today feels nothing short of extraordinary.

The Power of Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is the incredible ability of our brains to maintain function after degradation occurs. Even as we age, our brains are finding new ways to maintain functionality. Strokes, however, are destructive and our brains sometimes cannot maintain full function on their own. So in the context of post-stroke, neuroplasticity describes our brain's best efforts in the rearranging of neural pathways, and the generation of new neurons (through neurogenesis), in the hopes to restore lost brain functions. At a late chronic stage of a stroke, almost no recovery happens or is expected. There are some instances of stroke whereby within the first 6 months there is a spontaneous natural recovery to some extent: as cool as this can be, we should never expect this nor plan for it as this level of recovery.

A Groundbreaking Study

It is the chronic post 6-month stroke victims which we are going to focus on today and reference a study which used hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for 50 minutes 5 days a week for a total of 40 treatments. The study comprised of 74 patients, and just to make it more interesting, they made sure that each patient had a motor abnormality in which the patient was unable to move either a hand, leg, or finger; or take care of their routine daily tasks such as cooking, eating, and using the lavatory without assistance. The researchers contrasted these patients with a control group of stroke patients which continued with their standard rehabilitation.

After the 40 hyperbaric treatments, the treated patients demonstrated statistically significant improvement: by that I mean that they were able to move their affected limbs/extremities of which they were limited prior to treatment. The control group, unfortunately, saw no changes in motor function. These phenomenal results can be attributed to Hyperoxic-Hypoxic Paradox.

Understanding the Hyperoxic-Hypoxic Paradox

The Hyperoxic-Hypoxic Paradox (HHP) is a phenomenon that is leveraged during hyperbaric treatments when airbrakes are performed intermittently at treatment depth. During hyperbaric treatments, Airbrakes are short periods when the patient is supplied with 100% Medical-Grade Air (20% Oxygen) instead of 100% Medical-Grade Oxygen. HHP describes the body's unexpected response to this change in oxygen concentration at treatment depth. Strangely, the body believes that it has become acutely hypoxic (deprived of oxygen) and therefore goes into resuscitation mode: producing, recruiting, and migrating stem cells to the problem areas—especially the brain. These hypoxia-inducible factors can lead to the regeneration of damaged neural tissue!

Looking to the Future

In conclusion, hyperbaric oxygen therapy offers a groundbreaking approach to stroke recovery, particularly for chronic post-stroke patients who have long been considered beyond the window of significant improvement. By harnessing the Hyperoxic-Hypoxic Paradox, HBOT stimulates the body's natural ability to regenerate and repair vital neural pathways. The results so far provide a promising glimpse of hope for stroke survivors and their families, redefining what recovery could mean for a condition once deemed irreversible.