12 ms·

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy increases telomere length in isolated blood cells

164 points by generalizations 6y ago

rbanffy 6y ago
Were these results reproduced elsewhere?
- JoshuaDavid 6y ago
  These results appear to be a partial reproduction / further investigation of "Telomere elongation followed by telomere length reduction, in leukocytes from divers exposed to intense oxidative stress – Implications for tissue and organismal aging" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.208.4475&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.208...).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
api 6y ago
Hyperbaric oxygen isn't new, so I am putting this in the grey basket until I see it replicated. 25% telomere length increase and a senloytic effect just from breathing more O2 seems... weird. Not impossible, but weird that we would not have noticed such a thing yet.
ngvrnd 6y ago
"in isolated blood cells"
- jcims 6y ago
  Net/net it's probably safer to put a pint of blood into a hyperbaric machine than a complete human.
- multiplegeorges 6y ago
  You could try reading the article next time, rather than having a hot take based on the headline. "The HBOT protocol was administrated in a Multiplace Starmed-2700 chamber (HAUX, Germany). The protocol comprised of 60 daily sessions, five sessions per week within a three-month period. Each session included breathing 100% oxygen by mask at 2ATA for 90 minutes with 5-minute air breaks every 20 minutes. Compression/decompression rates were 1 meter/minute. During the trial, neither lifestyle and diet changes, nor medications adjustments were allowed."
  - Blammar 6y ago
    I am wondering how the subjects avoided oxygen toxicity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity for example.) Also, this is half of what needs to be checked. Does lengthening your telomeres have a measurable effect on your health?
    - CodinM 6y ago
      From the article - every 20 minutes they used a mask with (normal) air, from what I remember reading it a couple of days ago.
- Asooka 6y ago
  They could take your blood, treat it and put it back in. It could have the same regenerative effect as injecting blood from a younger person.
im3w1l 6y ago
So telomeres shortening has a useful purpose in preventing runaway cell division right? So wouldn't artificially increasing their lengths increase cancer incidence, unless combined with other interventions for fighting cancer?
- dfischer 6y ago
  Bret Weinstein has much to say about that. I have been meaning to revisit his conclusions. Sorry I don’t have a more specific answer but I do remember very interesting things brought up by him.
  - didgeoridoo 6y ago
    Indeed — Weinstein’s claim (that I don’t have the expertise to validate) is that an enormous amount of biomedical research is performed on a subset of mice from a single breeding facility in Maine. These mice have abnormally long telomeres as compared to wild mice. This means they can take remarkable amounts of cellular damage before apoptosis (cell death) is triggered. The downside is that, by forestalling even desirable apoptosis, these mouse cells frequently end up cancerous. If true, Weinstein says, this means that any compounds tested on these mice will necessarily look less damaging than they should, at least in the short run, because these mice have extensive regenerative capabilities. This might explain how certain drugs that cause heart damage (e.g. Vioxx) got approved — they looked safe in these super-mice, and human safety testing was too brief to catch the damage being done.
    - alextheparrot 6y ago
      I’m only vaguely familiar with Weinstein’s claims, but you might find the following news article about some research I remembered going to a talk to about 5 years ago [0]. There’s a lot of proposals in the stem cell community like this, though I lack the insight to vet whether that’s happening in practice. > About 80 percent of experimental drugs fail in human clinical trials because they are unsafe or ineffective, with some 30 percent found to be toxic in people despite promising results in animal studies Effectively, a huge percent of drugs are failing out in clinical trials — so a few false negatives where the phenotypes aren’t measured correctly or are on an incompatible time scale seems pretty expected. I haven’t seen anyone showing that “fixing” lab mice would’ve resulted in different animal trial results — is Bret claiming this? [0] https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/health_med_fit/tissue-chips-could-replace-animal-studies-uw-madison-researchers-say/article_8ee0cee1-57a6-5858-8d96-1b15c7387a7a.html https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/health_med_fit/tissue-chi...
fallingfrog 6y ago
They must be talking about immune system cells, iirc red blood cells don’t have a nucleus.
- didgeoridoo 6y ago
  Yep: “ Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) telomeres length and senescence were assessed” PBMCs = lymphocytes and monocytes
knowaveragejoe 6y ago
Can someone explain what this means in layman's terms? What significance does this have?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  "Some immune cells have a marker that makes them look younger and healthier after exposure to high pressure, high oxygen environments." Maybe. If the study is reproducible and yadda.
stanford_labrat 6y ago
On the topic of telomeres, Rejuvenation Tech is a YC company (S18) working on extending telomere length for health benefits.
- vixen99 6y ago
  Is there any evidence that people who regularly meditate live longer? Healthier people have longer telomeres but does a lengthening of the telomeres after they've presumably got shorter, then necessarily extend longevity?
  - stanford_labrat 6y ago
    Meditation? I cannot tell you. As for medication, yes. The principle is that capture before is best, but extension after shortening conveys a therapeutic effect.
averros 6y ago
Good thing I'm a tech diver certified for use of 100% oxygen as decompression "mix". Sitting at 10m for 90min every day for a month is too much, though...
patall 6y ago
I am sorry if I am pessimistic but as a person with a genetics background, I am very skeptical when a measure has an error bar (or variance in this case) that includes no-change as a plausible explaination, i.e 25.68%±40.42 And, for my taste, 25.68%±40.42 is really bad style. 26%±40 is the amount of precision I would accept here.
- iaw 6y ago
  A more informative way for them to express that range would be -15% to 65% where any negative % is no effect.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    Where any negative number is a detrimental effect, here. :P
- gpm 6y ago
  Sorry for the rant, but I hate this obsession with chopping off digits people have. 25.68% ± 40.42 is not the same as 26% ± 40. If I am later trying to make a model to get the best estimate of <stat> by looking at a bunch of other people's measurements I will get a more accurate answer if more digits are contained. When someone presents a state like 26% without the ± it's at least excusable, since it's avoiding making people think that 25.68% was short hand for 26.68% ± (0.005 ± 0.005)%, but when we're including the ± there is no good reason to chop off digits. I do like the comment someone else has about reporting this as a range instead of with a ± sign, i.e. "-14.74 to 66.1 percent".
  - cbkeller 6y ago
    This is a pet peeve of mine as well; significant figures can be handy, but fundamentally they originated as a quick and dirty method of keeping track of uncertainty that was quite handy when doing calculations by hand, but is more or less obsolete today any time you have an actual quantitative uncertainty bound. Sure, it's still convenient when writing things out in text to not continue adding digits far beyond the uncertainty of your value, but even so there is nothing "conservative" or in any way accurate about chopping off a bunch of digits (however imprecise) and replacing them with zeros. This is especially clear if we consider that we generally only ever consider sig figs in base 10, but in any computational context that number is definitely not stored in base 10.
nradov 6y ago
Well I guess I'll keep scuba diving then.
cpncrunch 6y ago
This seems to be an uncontrolled study. Stress reduces telomere length, and meditation has been shown to increase it: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2019.1707827?journalCode=gpsh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2019.17... So it's certainly plausible that the placebo effect of being involved in a study to prevent aging could in itself have an effect on telomere length, even without the hyperbaric oxygen.
- madrox 6y ago
  FWIW, as someone who had HBO therapy for five days a week for six months, I would not call it stress reducing.
  - al_chemist 6y ago
    Can I ask what requires HBO therapy for five days a week for six months?
    - wombatpm 6y ago
      Diving accidents
    - madrox 6y ago
      I had a bone infection as a child that took several years to positively diagnose (it ended up being osteomyelitis). In an attempt to help my body fight off the infection, I was prescribed a couple hours a day in a HBO chamber. HBO can be prescribed for infections of various kinds that are otherwise hard for the body to eliminate without assistance or straight antibiotics. This study aside, breathing pure oxygen for extended periods does wonders for the body's ability to repair itself. The upside of that time was that bruises and mosquito bites healed practically instantaneously.
      - al_chemist 6y ago
        Thank you.
- 6y ago
gilrain 6y ago
There's no reason to chase immortality. We always exist within the timeline of our lives; the present is not privileged in real physics.
- crystaln 6y ago
  The present is privileged in our real experience tho.
- hungryforcodes 6y ago
  But that's certainly a personal choice though. One day, with enough advances, we may choose to live arbitrarily extended lives.
- junon 6y ago
  Speak for yourself.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
One of the things HBOT is used for is treating Gangrene. This article (below) talks about HBOT and is not full of horrifying photos, and I don't recommend you google "Gangrene" if you aren't prepared to look at some really horrifying photos. I am not going to link to any resources on gangrene because I can't readily find any that don't make me cringe and I live with a serious medical condition (and processed accident claims for five plus years), so I am pretty callous about stuff like that. (Someone not taking my warning about medical photos seriously previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20680819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20680819) https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t... One of the potential causes of gangrene is anaerobic bacteria. And, so, my layman's understanding is that what happens is HBOT forces oxygen into tissues because it's under pressure. It's like some multiple of earth's atmospheric pressure and it can help kill anaerobic infection by exposing them to oxygen in parts of the body that otherwise wouldn't be getting good oxygen for some reason. I have a form of cystic fibrosis. It is best known as a respiratory condition, but that's not really accurate. It's a genetic disorder and it impairs cell function throughout the body and this impacts some tissues more obviously than others, such as the lungs. So cystic fibrosis causes a compromised immune system but, like, I spent a lot of years wondering "What does that even mean? Where is the immune system in my body? Which organs are they? How does CF make me so vulnerable to infection?" And the answer is that "the immune system" doesn't really mean a specific set of organs like "the circulatory system" or "the digestive system" means a specific set of organs. It's just kind of a catch phrase for "how the body protects itself" and it's not really that well understood or explained exactly that happens. People tend to die really young with CF (like in their 30s or younger) and they very often die of lung infection and treatment of lung issues is a really big part of managing CF. So one of the things I have concluded is that most likely one of the ways CF impairs my immune function is low oxygen in the body. Oxygen gets used to kill stuff. I think oxygen is an underrecognized part of your arsenal of tools to protect yourself from infection and it's useful against some things that are really nasty, like anaerobic infections, which tend to be ugly, from what I gather. So I have only skimmed this study. The science is probably over my head and, as if often the case, I am only futzing around on HN because I'm too tired to work at the moment (see the aforementioned deadly genetic disorder). So I am not going to thoroughly read this piece. If I were that mentally focused, I would be working. But I've skimmed it and I've skimmed the comments here and someone has pointed out this is not about red blood cells, it's about immune cells. And I will suggest it is plausible that immune cells in the blood would be revitalized by HBOT and "made younger" (that's basically what telomere length gets used as a proxy for) because of what I know about how HBOT gets used to treat certain infections and what I think -- the word think indicates personal opinion, so "don't @ me" as they say on twitter -- what I think about the importance of oxygen to immune function based on trying to understand "So, what on earth does it mean that my immune system is impaired? And how does that work with CF?"
SCAQTony 6y ago
According to Scientific American guest blogger, JALEES REHMAN, lengthening you telomeres also lengthens cancer DNA telomeres: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/aging-too-much-telomerase-can-be-as-bad-as-too-little/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/aging-too-mu...
- taneq 6y ago
  So putting this together with the claim that meditation increases telomere length... meditation increases your risk of cancer? :P
reasonattlm 6y ago
This interesting open access paper recently published reports on the effects of hyperbaric oxygen treatment on telomere length and cellular senescence in immune cells taken from blood samples. I use the word "interesting" quite deliberately, because that is exactly and all that this research is. The paper is appropriately formal and modest on that front, but this attitude doesn't extend to the rest of the publicity, unfortunately. When one runs a business based around offering hyperbaric oxygen treatment, one must make hay while the sun shines, and extract every last drop of marketing juice from every study funded. Hence there are media articles out there at the moment breathlessly telling us that hyperbaric oxygen treatment reverses aging. This is ridiculous, and only makes it harder for the better end of the longevity industry to make progress. Per the paper, hyperbaric oxygen treatment causes average telomere length to grow by ~20% and markers of cellular senescence to decrease by ~35% in populations of circulating immune cells. This doesn't tell us that hyperbaric oxygen treatment is an amazing rejuvenation therapy, any more than the NAD+ and mitochondrial function data for exercise tells us that exercise is an amazing rejuvenation therapy. In both cases we already know the bounds of the possible. We know that these interventions don't turn older people into notably younger people. If we're calling exercise and hyperbaric oxygen treatment rejuvenation therapies, then the term "rejuvenation therapy" is meaningless. What this does reinforce is the point that peripheral blood immune cell parameters can be very disconnected from the overall state of aging. We know that telomere length as assessed in these cells is a truly terrible measure of aging. Circulating immune cells are prone to large variations in the pace of celular replication in response to circumstances. Immune cells replicate aggressively when provoked by the presence of pathogens or other issues requiring a coordinated immune response. Telomere length shortens with every cell division in somatic cells: in immune cells, telomere length thus has a very wide spread across individuals, varies day to day, is just as influenced by infection status and other environmental factors as it is by aging. It is just not all that helpful as a measure of aging, and downward trends with age are only seen in the statistics for large study populations. It seems plausible that the same is true of cellular senescence in immune cells. Cells become senescent when they hit the Hayflick limit on cellular replication. Throughout much of life, the senescence of immune cells is likely more determined by replication pace (and thus immune challenges, the burden of infection) than by aging. And that is before we even get to the point that the authors of this paper used a less than standard measure of senescence, one for which it is possible to argue that it may or may not actually be representative of the burden of senescent cells in immune populations. Overall this data is all interesting, but I suspect that it tells us more about the poor relevance of the metrics chosen to anything other than the deeper aspects of immune function. If hyperbaric oxygen treatment removed ~35% of senescent cells throughout the body, it would already be well known as a reliable therapy for arthritis, a way to reverse chronic kidney disease, a way to suppress inflammatory conditions, and an effective treatment for numerous chronic diseases of aging. In mice, removing a third of senescent cells via senolytic drugs produces reliably large and beneficial outcomes, while hyperbaric oxygen treatment does not. So clearly it is not globally clearing senescent cells - and nor should any responsible party be trying to present reductions in senescent immune cells as indicative of global senolytic effects throughout the body. What is observed here is an effect limited to the way in which the immune system is functioning. There is some evidence for hyperbaric oxygen treatment to improve resistance to infectious disease such as influenza, and that is interesting in and of itself, but I feel that much of what is going on here is an attempt by certain parties to jump onto the longevity industry bandwagon, rather than responsibly focusing on a realistic view of what can be achieved with their chosen intervention.
codecamper 6y ago
People please learn how to distinguish between hype & fact. Facts: senolytics, maybe even epigenetic reprogramming, autophagy, blood transfusions from young to old, genetic editing (APOE4->APOE2. maybe even the icelandic varient someday) Hype: Anything where oxygen and anti-oxidants are involved. Generally anything that involves oxygen.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  do you have references for these claims? thanks in advance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
clort 6y ago
I saw this the other day, and something I don't understand about it is that ~40 years ago (so its dimly remembered) I did SCUBA training and oxygen toxicity is definitely a thing. So how is it that having a partial pressure of oxygen over a certain level while diving is toxic (delirium causing, which is especially dangerous underwater) but in a hyperbaric chamber is theraputic?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

rbanffy 6y ago

Were these results reproduced elsewhere?

JoshuaDavid 6y ago
These results appear to be a partial reproduction / further investigation of "Telomere elongation followed by telomere length reduction, in leukocytes from divers exposed to intense oxidative stress – Implications for tissue and organismal aging" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.208.4475&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.208...).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

api 6y ago

Hyperbaric oxygen isn't new, so I am putting this in the grey basket until I see it replicated. 25% telomere length increase and a senloytic effect just from breathing more O2 seems... weird. Not impossible, but weird that we would not have noticed such a thing yet.

ngvrnd 6y ago

"in isolated blood cells"

jcims 6y ago
Net/net it's probably safer to put a pint of blood into a hyperbaric machine than a complete human.
multiplegeorges 6y ago
You could try reading the article next time, rather than having a hot take based on the headline. "The HBOT protocol was administrated in a Multiplace Starmed-2700 chamber (HAUX, Germany). The protocol comprised of 60 daily sessions, five sessions per week within a three-month period. Each session included breathing 100% oxygen by mask at 2ATA for 90 minutes with 5-minute air breaks every 20 minutes. Compression/decompression rates were 1 meter/minute. During the trial, neither lifestyle and diet changes, nor medications adjustments were allowed."
- Blammar 6y ago
  I am wondering how the subjects avoided oxygen toxicity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity for example.) Also, this is half of what needs to be checked. Does lengthening your telomeres have a measurable effect on your health?
  - CodinM 6y ago
    From the article - every 20 minutes they used a mask with (normal) air, from what I remember reading it a couple of days ago.
Asooka 6y ago
They could take your blood, treat it and put it back in. It could have the same regenerative effect as injecting blood from a younger person.

im3w1l 6y ago

So telomeres shortening has a useful purpose in preventing runaway cell division right? So wouldn't artificially increasing their lengths increase cancer incidence, unless combined with other interventions for fighting cancer?

dfischer 6y ago
Bret Weinstein has much to say about that. I have been meaning to revisit his conclusions. Sorry I don’t have a more specific answer but I do remember very interesting things brought up by him.
- didgeoridoo 6y ago
  Indeed — Weinstein’s claim (that I don’t have the expertise to validate) is that an enormous amount of biomedical research is performed on a subset of mice from a single breeding facility in Maine. These mice have abnormally long telomeres as compared to wild mice. This means they can take remarkable amounts of cellular damage before apoptosis (cell death) is triggered. The downside is that, by forestalling even desirable apoptosis, these mouse cells frequently end up cancerous. If true, Weinstein says, this means that any compounds tested on these mice will necessarily look less damaging than they should, at least in the short run, because these mice have extensive regenerative capabilities. This might explain how certain drugs that cause heart damage (e.g. Vioxx) got approved — they looked safe in these super-mice, and human safety testing was too brief to catch the damage being done.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    I’m only vaguely familiar with Weinstein’s claims, but you might find the following news article about some research I remembered going to a talk to about 5 years ago [0]. There’s a lot of proposals in the stem cell community like this, though I lack the insight to vet whether that’s happening in practice. > About 80 percent of experimental drugs fail in human clinical trials because they are unsafe or ineffective, with some 30 percent found to be toxic in people despite promising results in animal studies Effectively, a huge percent of drugs are failing out in clinical trials — so a few false negatives where the phenotypes aren’t measured correctly or are on an incompatible time scale seems pretty expected. I haven’t seen anyone showing that “fixing” lab mice would’ve resulted in different animal trial results — is Bret claiming this? [0] https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/health_med_fit/tissue-chips-could-replace-animal-studies-uw-madison-researchers-say/article_8ee0cee1-57a6-5858-8d96-1b15c7387a7a.html https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/health_med_fit/tissue-chi...

fallingfrog 6y ago

They must be talking about immune system cells, iirc red blood cells don’t have a nucleus.

didgeoridoo 6y ago
Yep: “ Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) telomeres length and senescence were assessed” PBMCs = lymphocytes and monocytes

knowaveragejoe 6y ago

Can someone explain what this means in layman's terms? What significance does this have?

DoreenMichele 6y ago
"Some immune cells have a marker that makes them look younger and healthier after exposure to high pressure, high oxygen environments." Maybe. If the study is reproducible and yadda.

stanford_labrat 6y ago

On the topic of telomeres, Rejuvenation Tech is a YC company (S18) working on extending telomere length for health benefits.

vixen99 6y ago
Is there any evidence that people who regularly meditate live longer? Healthier people have longer telomeres but does a lengthening of the telomeres after they've presumably got shorter, then necessarily extend longevity?
- stanford_labrat 6y ago
  Meditation? I cannot tell you. As for medication, yes. The principle is that capture before is best, but extension after shortening conveys a therapeutic effect.

averros 6y ago

Good thing I'm a tech diver certified for use of 100% oxygen as decompression "mix". Sitting at 10m for 90min every day for a month is too much, though...

patall 6y ago

I am sorry if I am pessimistic but as a person with a genetics background, I am very skeptical when a measure has an error bar (or variance in this case) that includes no-change as a plausible explaination, i.e 25.68%±40.42 And, for my taste, 25.68%±40.42 is really bad style. 26%±40 is the amount of precision I would accept here.

iaw 6y ago
A more informative way for them to express that range would be -15% to 65% where any negative % is no effect.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Where any negative number is a detrimental effect, here. :P
gpm 6y ago
Sorry for the rant, but I hate this obsession with chopping off digits people have. 25.68% ± 40.42 is not the same as 26% ± 40. If I am later trying to make a model to get the best estimate of <stat> by looking at a bunch of other people's measurements I will get a more accurate answer if more digits are contained. When someone presents a state like 26% without the ± it's at least excusable, since it's avoiding making people think that 25.68% was short hand for 26.68% ± (0.005 ± 0.005)%, but when we're including the ± there is no good reason to chop off digits. I do like the comment someone else has about reporting this as a range instead of with a ± sign, i.e. "-14.74 to 66.1 percent".
- cbkeller 6y ago
  This is a pet peeve of mine as well; significant figures can be handy, but fundamentally they originated as a quick and dirty method of keeping track of uncertainty that was quite handy when doing calculations by hand, but is more or less obsolete today any time you have an actual quantitative uncertainty bound. Sure, it's still convenient when writing things out in text to not continue adding digits far beyond the uncertainty of your value, but even so there is nothing "conservative" or in any way accurate about chopping off a bunch of digits (however imprecise) and replacing them with zeros. This is especially clear if we consider that we generally only ever consider sig figs in base 10, but in any computational context that number is definitely not stored in base 10.

nradov 6y ago

Well I guess I'll keep scuba diving then.

cpncrunch 6y ago

This seems to be an uncontrolled study. Stress reduces telomere length, and meditation has been shown to increase it: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2019.1707827?journalCode=gpsh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2019.17... So it's certainly plausible that the placebo effect of being involved in a study to prevent aging could in itself have an effect on telomere length, even without the hyperbaric oxygen.

madrox 6y ago
FWIW, as someone who had HBO therapy for five days a week for six months, I would not call it stress reducing.
- al_chemist 6y ago
  Can I ask what requires HBO therapy for five days a week for six months?
  - wombatpm 6y ago
    Diving accidents
  - madrox 6y ago
    I had a bone infection as a child that took several years to positively diagnose (it ended up being osteomyelitis). In an attempt to help my body fight off the infection, I was prescribed a couple hours a day in a HBO chamber. HBO can be prescribed for infections of various kinds that are otherwise hard for the body to eliminate without assistance or straight antibiotics. This study aside, breathing pure oxygen for extended periods does wonders for the body's ability to repair itself. The upside of that time was that bruises and mosquito bites healed practically instantaneously.
    - al_chemist 6y ago
      Thank you.
6y ago

gilrain 6y ago

There's no reason to chase immortality. We always exist within the timeline of our lives; the present is not privileged in real physics.

crystaln 6y ago
The present is privileged in our real experience tho.
hungryforcodes 6y ago
But that's certainly a personal choice though. One day, with enough advances, we may choose to live arbitrarily extended lives.
junon 6y ago
Speak for yourself.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

One of the things HBOT is used for is treating Gangrene. This article (below) talks about HBOT and is not full of horrifying photos, and I don't recommend you google "Gangrene" if you aren't prepared to look at some really horrifying photos. I am not going to link to any resources on gangrene because I can't readily find any that don't make me cringe and I live with a serious medical condition (and processed accident claims for five plus years), so I am pretty callous about stuff like that. (Someone not taking my warning about medical photos seriously previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20680819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20680819) https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t... One of the potential causes of gangrene is anaerobic bacteria. And, so, my layman's understanding is that what happens is HBOT forces oxygen into tissues because it's under pressure. It's like some multiple of earth's atmospheric pressure and it can help kill anaerobic infection by exposing them to oxygen in parts of the body that otherwise wouldn't be getting good oxygen for some reason. I have a form of cystic fibrosis. It is best known as a respiratory condition, but that's not really accurate. It's a genetic disorder and it impairs cell function throughout the body and this impacts some tissues more obviously than others, such as the lungs. So cystic fibrosis causes a compromised immune system but, like, I spent a lot of years wondering "What does that even mean? Where is the immune system in my body? Which organs are they? How does CF make me so vulnerable to infection?" And the answer is that "the immune system" doesn't really mean a specific set of organs like "the circulatory system" or "the digestive system" means a specific set of organs. It's just kind of a catch phrase for "how the body protects itself" and it's not really that well understood or explained exactly that happens. People tend to die really young with CF (like in their 30s or younger) and they very often die of lung infection and treatment of lung issues is a really big part of managing CF. So one of the things I have concluded is that most likely one of the ways CF impairs my immune function is low oxygen in the body. Oxygen gets used to kill stuff. I think oxygen is an underrecognized part of your arsenal of tools to protect yourself from infection and it's useful against some things that are really nasty, like anaerobic infections, which tend to be ugly, from what I gather. So I have only skimmed this study. The science is probably over my head and, as if often the case, I am only futzing around on HN because I'm too tired to work at the moment (see the aforementioned deadly genetic disorder). So I am not going to thoroughly read this piece. If I were that mentally focused, I would be working. But I've skimmed it and I've skimmed the comments here and someone has pointed out this is not about red blood cells, it's about immune cells. And I will suggest it is plausible that immune cells in the blood would be revitalized by HBOT and "made younger" (that's basically what telomere length gets used as a proxy for) because of what I know about how HBOT gets used to treat certain infections and what I think -- the word think indicates personal opinion, so "don't @ me" as they say on twitter -- what I think about the importance of oxygen to immune function based on trying to understand "So, what on earth does it mean that my immune system is impaired? And how does that work with CF?"

SCAQTony 6y ago

According to Scientific American guest blogger, JALEES REHMAN, lengthening you telomeres also lengthens cancer DNA telomeres: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/aging-too-much-telomerase-can-be-as-bad-as-too-little/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/aging-too-mu...

taneq 6y ago
So putting this together with the claim that meditation increases telomere length... meditation increases your risk of cancer? :P

reasonattlm 6y ago

This interesting open access paper recently published reports on the effects of hyperbaric oxygen treatment on telomere length and cellular senescence in immune cells taken from blood samples. I use the word "interesting" quite deliberately, because that is exactly and all that this research is. The paper is appropriately formal and modest on that front, but this attitude doesn't extend to the rest of the publicity, unfortunately. When one runs a business based around offering hyperbaric oxygen treatment, one must make hay while the sun shines, and extract every last drop of marketing juice from every study funded. Hence there are media articles out there at the moment breathlessly telling us that hyperbaric oxygen treatment reverses aging. This is ridiculous, and only makes it harder for the better end of the longevity industry to make progress. Per the paper, hyperbaric oxygen treatment causes average telomere length to grow by ~20% and markers of cellular senescence to decrease by ~35% in populations of circulating immune cells. This doesn't tell us that hyperbaric oxygen treatment is an amazing rejuvenation therapy, any more than the NAD+ and mitochondrial function data for exercise tells us that exercise is an amazing rejuvenation therapy. In both cases we already know the bounds of the possible. We know that these interventions don't turn older people into notably younger people. If we're calling exercise and hyperbaric oxygen treatment rejuvenation therapies, then the term "rejuvenation therapy" is meaningless. What this does reinforce is the point that peripheral blood immune cell parameters can be very disconnected from the overall state of aging. We know that telomere length as assessed in these cells is a truly terrible measure of aging. Circulating immune cells are prone to large variations in the pace of celular replication in response to circumstances. Immune cells replicate aggressively when provoked by the presence of pathogens or other issues requiring a coordinated immune response. Telomere length shortens with every cell division in somatic cells: in immune cells, telomere length thus has a very wide spread across individuals, varies day to day, is just as influenced by infection status and other environmental factors as it is by aging. It is just not all that helpful as a measure of aging, and downward trends with age are only seen in the statistics for large study populations. It seems plausible that the same is true of cellular senescence in immune cells. Cells become senescent when they hit the Hayflick limit on cellular replication. Throughout much of life, the senescence of immune cells is likely more determined by replication pace (and thus immune challenges, the burden of infection) than by aging. And that is before we even get to the point that the authors of this paper used a less than standard measure of senescence, one for which it is possible to argue that it may or may not actually be representative of the burden of senescent cells in immune populations. Overall this data is all interesting, but I suspect that it tells us more about the poor relevance of the metrics chosen to anything other than the deeper aspects of immune function. If hyperbaric oxygen treatment removed ~35% of senescent cells throughout the body, it would already be well known as a reliable therapy for arthritis, a way to reverse chronic kidney disease, a way to suppress inflammatory conditions, and an effective treatment for numerous chronic diseases of aging. In mice, removing a third of senescent cells via senolytic drugs produces reliably large and beneficial outcomes, while hyperbaric oxygen treatment does not. So clearly it is not globally clearing senescent cells - and nor should any responsible party be trying to present reductions in senescent immune cells as indicative of global senolytic effects throughout the body. What is observed here is an effect limited to the way in which the immune system is functioning. There is some evidence for hyperbaric oxygen treatment to improve resistance to infectious disease such as influenza, and that is interesting in and of itself, but I feel that much of what is going on here is an attempt by certain parties to jump onto the longevity industry bandwagon, rather than responsibly focusing on a realistic view of what can be achieved with their chosen intervention.

codecamper 6y ago

People please learn how to distinguish between hype & fact. Facts: senolytics, maybe even epigenetic reprogramming, autophagy, blood transfusions from young to old, genetic editing (APOE4->APOE2. maybe even the icelandic varient someday) Hype: Anything where oxygen and anti-oxidants are involved. Generally anything that involves oxygen.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
do you have references for these claims? thanks in advance.
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clort 6y ago

I saw this the other day, and something I don't understand about it is that ~40 years ago (so its dimly remembered) I did SCUBA training and oxygen toxicity is definitely a thing. So how is it that having a partial pressure of oxygen over a certain level while diving is toxic (delirium causing, which is especially dangerous underwater) but in a hyperbaric chamber is theraputic?

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