Hyperbaric oxygen therapy: the new method to treat the symptoms of Covid-long?

Accompanying and relieving people with Covid-long remains, even today, difficult. Generally, only time alleviates a small part of the symptoms (fatigue, smell and taste disorder, etc.). But new work published in the journal Nature could possibly change that. This first trial details the potential of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) in patients with long Covid.

Better cell oxygenation

Hyperbaric oxygenation (HBO) is a therapeutic method well known to divers and mountaineers.

It makes it possible to boost the body via concentrated oxygen under pressure, to treat various acute pathologies (decompression accidents, carbon monoxide poisoning, burns, etc.) or chronic (diabetic ulcers, brain damage, fibromyalgia, etc.) and even to treat decompression accidents (inhaled oxygen passes more into the blood).

In view of all these effects, the researchers therefore wanted to assess the impact of this method on patients suffering from long-term Covid – whose symptoms persisted for at least 3 months after infection.

Less fatigue, pain, cognitive symptoms and anxiety

A total of 73 patients were included in the analysis. Half received the real treatment and the other half a placebo treatment.

The oxygen-doped group quickly showed an improvement in different symptoms: better sleep, less fatigue and pain, better information processing speed, improvement in psychiatric symptoms, more mental energy, improvement in global cognitive function, attention and executive functions (the ability to plan, organize, initiate, self-monitor and control one’s responses in order to achieve a goal)… “Anxiety” scores and “depression” improved significantly in the HBO group compared to the control group. The results were a little less convincing in terms of improving taste, especially sweetness.

All clinical findings correlated with participants’ brain images, indicating a significant change in the parts of the brain related to each function, which had been visibly damaged by the COVID-19 virus.

Furthermore, no side effects were detected. in both groups.

Promising results that remain to be confirmed

“For the first time, our study provides an effective treatment for patients with long COVID, repairing brain damage with an intensive HBOT protocol. Additionally, the study reveals the very real biological damage to brain tissue induced by the COVID-19 virus, and how repairing this damage reduces symptoms and may eventually lead to recovery. More broadly, these findings may also suggest that other neurological and psychiatric syndromes could be triggered by biological agents such as viruses, opening new possibilities for future treatments“says Prof. Shai Efrati, co-author of the study.

These rather promising results will nevertheless have to be the subject of other, larger studies, before being the subject of generalized use. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not yet approved the treatment, stating that “studies are in progress.