Researchers in the United States, after treating a drowned and resuscitated baby with a combination of oxygen therapies, reported what they believe is a frontline reversal of brain damage.
The girl whose heart stopped for two hours showed a deep gray wound and brain atrophy with loss of gray and white matter after the accident and could no longer speak, walk or respond to the voices - she would be uncontrolled and shake her head.
Surprisingly, through a series of oxygen treatments administered by a team of LSU Health New Orleans and the University of North Dakota, doctors were able to reverse the brain damage they had experienced.
Drowning occurred in February 2016, when two-year-old Eden Carlson slipped through the baby's door while her mother suspected, then passed a heavy door before finally falling into the family pool.
She was submerged for 15 minutes before being discovered and suffered a heart attack, and while her mother began CPR immediately, they were not revived for two hours. After critical care at the Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the girl was released, but because of the severity of her brain damage, hyperbaric specialist Paul Harch suggested treatment with oxygen therapies for the purpose of arousing his brain damaged.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy works by administering oxygen to a patient at an ambient pressure above atmospheric pressure by using a sealed pressure chamber. In this way, the oxygen in the patient's blood increases, which can finally restore normal blood content and repair damaged tissue.
In Eden's case, it was not close enough to a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, so the Harch team started a bridge course of normobaric oxygen treatments delivered at sea level - fifty-five days after drowning.
The treatments, administered for 45 minutes, twice a day, through a nasal cannula, saw Eden recover and reduce her shift, giving her arms and hands greater movement. In addition, he also gained some of his ability to eat verbally, to talk short sentences and to laugh.
About three weeks later, researchers moved Eden and her family to New Orleans, where she began a series of new treatments in a hyperbaric chamber. After only ten sessions, Eden's mother noticed that her daughter was "almost normal", with the exception of gross motor function, "and she started having physiotherapy.
As soon as 39 hyperbaric sessions were completed, Edens improved and his speech level was better than before the accident. He showed improvements in all abnormal neurological tests and showed almost normal motor function and knowledge.
At the end of treatment, 162 days after drowning, MRI showed that Eden still had a slight residual lesion in her brain, but she had an almost complete reversal of cortical atrophy and white matter.
The team that studies their restoration study, to their knowledge, is this type of investment "not reported with therapy". Although it does not fully understand the exact distribution of this amazing revival, it is clear that norbarbital and hyperbaric oxygen treatments have combined to reduce inflammation and promote brain cell survival.
Harch states that "while it is impossible to conclude from this particular case, if sequential application of normobaric oxygen, HBOT would be more effective than HBOT alone, in the absence of HBOT treatment, in the short term, repetitive normobaric oxygen therapy may be an option. This low-risk medical treatment can have a profound effect on restoring function in similar patients who are destroyed neurologically by drowning. "