9 ms·

Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment for Alzheimer's

133 points by taf2 5y ago

elromulous 5y ago
Seems very similar to [1] from a few weeks ago. Iirc the prevailing conclusion back then was that the sample set was way too small, and was absent a control group. And seems like the same is true here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508070
- nabla9 5y ago
  In a pilot study like this, the effect size is only thing that matters. In this study the effect size is so small that it would not make this treatment very effective even if it was real.
antegamisou 5y ago
I'm always happy to read about any kind of progress on AD amelioration but N = 42 is unfortunately a very small sample size to justify any potential encouraging results.
- nradov 5y ago
  Due to the time and expense involved in hyperbaric therapy it's really tough to study large numbers of subjects.
m463 5y ago
> Conclusion > Based on previous studies and our recent findings, we propose that hyperbaric oxygen treatment may be a promising alternative therapy for AD and aMCI. > Keywords: Alzheimer's disease, hyperbaric oxygen treatment, hypoxia, mild cognitive impairment
cpncrunch 5y ago
No placebo control, and not even mention of limitations of the study. Of course getting into a hyperbaric chamber with even normal pressure in itself will have a cognitive effect.
- jasonlaramburu 5y ago
  It seems like it would be impossible to have a true double blind study with something like hyperbaric oxygen. Once the chamber reaches pressure, it is very obvious to the patient.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    I wonder if one could compensate by having a control group with high-pressure but low-concentration oxygen
    - jasonlaramburu 5y ago
      Would that be safe for the patients?
      - FredPret 5y ago
        I speak under correction but I think that's how diving works - high pressure air, with extra nitrogen. So the concentration of oxygen is less but the total amount is the same
        BenjiWiebe 5y ago
        I too speak under correction, but usually the nitrogen gas is actually at a lower percentage or eliminated altogether. Pressurized nitrogen causes nitrogen narcosis, so the filler gas instead is commonly helium.
  - twic 5y ago
    > Each treatment included 20‐minute pure oxygen inhalation (O2 = 99.9%, oxygen supply pressure 0.4 to 0.7 MPa, oxygen flow 10 to 15 L/h), 15 minutes interval, and then another 20‐minute pure oxygen inhalation (O2 = 99.9%, oxygen supply pressure 0.4 to 0.7 MPa, oxygen flow 10 to 15 L/h) under the pressure of 0.22 MPa (0.12 MPa on pressure gauge) in hyperbaric oxygen chamber (Medical Oxygen Chamber, SY3200‐8500, Yantai Hongyuan Oxygen Industrial Inc., Shandong, China). Controls that spring to mind would be to have the chamber pressurised to a lower pressure (if you're not already familiar with hyperbaric chambers, you won't know it's at a lower pressure), or to replace the pure oxygen with normal air. Showing a dose-response relationship to pressure or oxygen concentration would go a long way towards making up for the lack of a true negative control.
taxicabjesus 5y ago
Oxygen is known to be toxic at high pressure. Most healthy young army recruits can withstand a pure oxygen atmosphere (at normal atmospheric pressure) for up to 24 hours before they begin to suffer adverse effects. Astronauts could withstand the pure oxygen atmospheres in the space program because the pressure of the capsules was significantly less than 1atm. NASA wrote a report on the toxic properties of oxygen while working on the Apollo program: Space-cabin Atmospheres: Oxygen toxicity (1964) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728 Any benefit of high pressure oxygen treatment is short lived. People lose their metabolisms as they age. Alzheimer's is one possible result.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> People lose their metabolisms as they age. Alzheimer's is one possible result. Except for those with early-onset alzheimer's. And some old people never get it. So it isn't as simple as saying that old people get old. There is a specific disease at play, one that likely can be treated or even cured once we better understand the underlying causes. >> Most healthy young army recruits can withstand a pure oxygen atmosphere Who is still doing this? Those were phenomenally dangerous studies that I haven't heard about in decades. Outside of space suits, nobody is puts people in pure oxygen atmospheres anymore. Even hyperbaric oxygen therapy doesn't use pure O2. At most, subjects breath pure O2 in a mask.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    And of course it's not just toxic; the fire risk is the other reason you don't want to fill a room with pure O2. As NASA sadly learned in Apollo 1.
    - taxicabjesus 5y ago
      NASA originally spec'd a mixed gas atmosphere for Apollo, it just got too heavy. After the fire in Apollo 1, they switched to mixed-gas at launch, with this gradually bleeding out to pure O2 as the mission progressed. This was discussed in my comment in my linked submission.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
I didn't see any comparison with ambient pressure O2 treatment. Wearing a nasal cannula with 6 LPM O2 from a bottle or concentrator is easy to do at home. But nobody has a hyperbaric chamber at home. Is the hyperbaric treatment absolutely necessary and if so why?
- xvedejas 5y ago
  There are two ways to increase the partial pressure of oxygen: either raise the overall pressure, or increase the concentration of oxygen (at the expense of nitrogen concentration, surely). Assuming a change in nitrogen partial pressure isn't going to interfere with things, I'd have to agree, there's not an obvious difference between the two. Maybe the researchers used a hyperbaric chamber just because they had access to a hyperbaric chamber.
  - ajb 5y ago
    A hyperbaric chamber treatment generally does both, so raises the partial pressure more than you could without it. And indeed that is what they did here.
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    >Assuming a change in nitrogen partial pressure isn't going to interfere with things That may not be safe to assume! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1130736/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1130736/ >The anesthetic effect of air at atmospheric pressure >Nitrogen has recognized narcotic potential at hyperbaric pressures. No narcotic effect of helium has been demonstrated at any pressure. We evaluated the effect of nitrogen in air at one atmosphere on human performance by comparing it with helium-oxygen using a four-alternative divided-attention task that requires rapid response to auditory and visual signal changes. There was a 9.3 per cent decrease in response time when subjects breathed helium-oxygen, a significant change (P less than 0.001). This change could not be ascribed to practice since the order of presentation of gases did not have a significant effect. It concluded that the nitrogen in ambient air slightly but measurable impairs human performance compared with a non-anesthetic gas such as helium.
ozfive 5y ago
What about this? https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/likely-cause-of-alzheimers-identified-in-new-study https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/likely-cause-of-al...
Ice_cream_suit 5y ago
This might happen after a few months along with much hilarity among all concerned: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cbr.2019.3535.retract https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cbr.2019.3535.retract "Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals officially retracts the paper entitled, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” by Fangen Kong, Yang Yan, Jinfeng Deng, Yaoli Zhu, Yingqin Li, Huiqing Li, and Yiping Wang (Cancer Biother Radiopharm. E-pub ahead of print 23 Jul 2020; doi: 10.1089/cbr.2019.3535) at the authors' request: “We apologized that we have found a serious problem in our paper. In fact, the Western blot experiment in our study was commissioned a third-party company for testing. In present, some peers have found that the company has forged experimental reports. After contacting the company, they were unable to provide the original images. We have checked and confirmed that the authenticity of the data provided by the company is problematic. In view of the problems in this paper, all the authors have discussed and agreed to withdraw the paper.” The journal publisher requested the name of the “third-party company,” to which the authors replied: “We apologize for our mistakes. Our so-called "the third party company", after further investigation, is actually not a company but an individual person. Due to the personal reasons, the previous experimental data were lost and the original raw data could not be provided. So we can not guarantee the authenticity of those data provided by that person. Some members are considering to repeat the experiment again, but we have no way to raise enough fund to repeat it. Hence after serious discussion, we decided to withdraw the manuscript. Again we apologize sincerely for your inconvenience."
- FatalLogic 5y ago
  It's an interesting story but there seems to be no connection to the OP. It's a different field, different researchers, from a different institution. What's the connection?
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    Seriously. I was looking for one myself. The only thing I can think of is that he noticed they both have Chinese names. Nice
nabla9 5y ago
The effect size and it's duration is not that high. They found small effect that lasted a month and faded away quickly afterwards.
qwerty456127 5y ago
I'm curious, doesn't Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment contribute to oxidative stress? What happens if someone does it regularly?
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
What happened with the lsd microdosing treatment of Alzheimer? Did it do any good? Are there any follow ups on that one? There are some articles from august of last year that mention the idea, but I don't know if the trials were successful. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsyn.2020.00034/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsyn.2020.0003... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973482/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973482/

133 points by taf2 5y ago

Seems very similar to [1] from a few weeks ago. Iirc the prevailing conclusion back then was that the sample set was way too small, and was absent a control group. And seems like the same is true here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508070

nabla9 5y ago
In a pilot study like this, the effect size is only thing that matters. In this study the effect size is so small that it would not make this treatment very effective even if it was real.

antegamisou 5y ago

I'm always happy to read about any kind of progress on AD amelioration but N = 42 is unfortunately a very small sample size to justify any potential encouraging results.

nradov 5y ago
Due to the time and expense involved in hyperbaric therapy it's really tough to study large numbers of subjects.

m463 5y ago

> Conclusion > Based on previous studies and our recent findings, we propose that hyperbaric oxygen treatment may be a promising alternative therapy for AD and aMCI. > Keywords: Alzheimer's disease, hyperbaric oxygen treatment, hypoxia, mild cognitive impairment

cpncrunch 5y ago

No placebo control, and not even mention of limitations of the study. Of course getting into a hyperbaric chamber with even normal pressure in itself will have a cognitive effect.

jasonlaramburu 5y ago
It seems like it would be impossible to have a true double blind study with something like hyperbaric oxygen. Once the chamber reaches pressure, it is very obvious to the patient.
- FredPret 5y ago
  I wonder if one could compensate by having a control group with high-pressure but low-concentration oxygen
  - jasonlaramburu 5y ago
    Would that be safe for the patients?
    - FredPret 5y ago
      I speak under correction but I think that's how diving works - high pressure air, with extra nitrogen. So the concentration of oxygen is less but the total amount is the same
      - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
        I too speak under correction, but usually the nitrogen gas is actually at a lower percentage or eliminated altogether. Pressurized nitrogen causes nitrogen narcosis, so the filler gas instead is commonly helium.
- twic 5y ago
  > Each treatment included 20‐minute pure oxygen inhalation (O2 = 99.9%, oxygen supply pressure 0.4 to 0.7 MPa, oxygen flow 10 to 15 L/h), 15 minutes interval, and then another 20‐minute pure oxygen inhalation (O2 = 99.9%, oxygen supply pressure 0.4 to 0.7 MPa, oxygen flow 10 to 15 L/h) under the pressure of 0.22 MPa (0.12 MPa on pressure gauge) in hyperbaric oxygen chamber (Medical Oxygen Chamber, SY3200‐8500, Yantai Hongyuan Oxygen Industrial Inc., Shandong, China). Controls that spring to mind would be to have the chamber pressurised to a lower pressure (if you're not already familiar with hyperbaric chambers, you won't know it's at a lower pressure), or to replace the pure oxygen with normal air. Showing a dose-response relationship to pressure or oxygen concentration would go a long way towards making up for the lack of a true negative control.

taxicabjesus 5y ago

Oxygen is known to be toxic at high pressure. Most healthy young army recruits can withstand a pure oxygen atmosphere (at normal atmospheric pressure) for up to 24 hours before they begin to suffer adverse effects. Astronauts could withstand the pure oxygen atmospheres in the space program because the pressure of the capsules was significantly less than 1atm. NASA wrote a report on the toxic properties of oxygen while working on the Apollo program: Space-cabin Atmospheres: Oxygen toxicity (1964) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728 Any benefit of high pressure oxygen treatment is short lived. People lose their metabolisms as they age. Alzheimer's is one possible result.

sandworm101 5y ago
>> People lose their metabolisms as they age. Alzheimer's is one possible result. Except for those with early-onset alzheimer's. And some old people never get it. So it isn't as simple as saying that old people get old. There is a specific disease at play, one that likely can be treated or even cured once we better understand the underlying causes. >> Most healthy young army recruits can withstand a pure oxygen atmosphere Who is still doing this? Those were phenomenally dangerous studies that I haven't heard about in decades. Outside of space suits, nobody is puts people in pure oxygen atmospheres anymore. Even hyperbaric oxygen therapy doesn't use pure O2. At most, subjects breath pure O2 in a mask.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  And of course it's not just toxic; the fire risk is the other reason you don't want to fill a room with pure O2. As NASA sadly learned in Apollo 1.
  - taxicabjesus 5y ago
    NASA originally spec'd a mixed gas atmosphere for Apollo, it just got too heavy. After the fire in Apollo 1, they switched to mixed-gas at launch, with this gradually bleeding out to pure O2 as the mission progressed. This was discussed in my comment in my linked submission.

dreamcompiler 5y ago

I didn't see any comparison with ambient pressure O2 treatment. Wearing a nasal cannula with 6 LPM O2 from a bottle or concentrator is easy to do at home. But nobody has a hyperbaric chamber at home. Is the hyperbaric treatment absolutely necessary and if so why?

xvedejas 5y ago
There are two ways to increase the partial pressure of oxygen: either raise the overall pressure, or increase the concentration of oxygen (at the expense of nitrogen concentration, surely). Assuming a change in nitrogen partial pressure isn't going to interfere with things, I'd have to agree, there's not an obvious difference between the two. Maybe the researchers used a hyperbaric chamber just because they had access to a hyperbaric chamber.
- ajb 5y ago
  A hyperbaric chamber treatment generally does both, so raises the partial pressure more than you could without it. And indeed that is what they did here.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  >Assuming a change in nitrogen partial pressure isn't going to interfere with things That may not be safe to assume! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1130736/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1130736/ >The anesthetic effect of air at atmospheric pressure >Nitrogen has recognized narcotic potential at hyperbaric pressures. No narcotic effect of helium has been demonstrated at any pressure. We evaluated the effect of nitrogen in air at one atmosphere on human performance by comparing it with helium-oxygen using a four-alternative divided-attention task that requires rapid response to auditory and visual signal changes. There was a 9.3 per cent decrease in response time when subjects breathed helium-oxygen, a significant change (P less than 0.001). This change could not be ascribed to practice since the order of presentation of gases did not have a significant effect. It concluded that the nitrogen in ambient air slightly but measurable impairs human performance compared with a non-anesthetic gas such as helium.

ozfive 5y ago

What about this? https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/likely-cause-of-alzheimers-identified-in-new-study https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/likely-cause-of-al...

Ice_cream_suit 5y ago

This might happen after a few months along with much hilarity among all concerned: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cbr.2019.3535.retract https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cbr.2019.3535.retract "Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals officially retracts the paper entitled, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” by Fangen Kong, Yang Yan, Jinfeng Deng, Yaoli Zhu, Yingqin Li, Huiqing Li, and Yiping Wang (Cancer Biother Radiopharm. E-pub ahead of print 23 Jul 2020; doi: 10.1089/cbr.2019.3535) at the authors' request: “We apologized that we have found a serious problem in our paper. In fact, the Western blot experiment in our study was commissioned a third-party company for testing. In present, some peers have found that the company has forged experimental reports. After contacting the company, they were unable to provide the original images. We have checked and confirmed that the authenticity of the data provided by the company is problematic. In view of the problems in this paper, all the authors have discussed and agreed to withdraw the paper.” The journal publisher requested the name of the “third-party company,” to which the authors replied: “We apologize for our mistakes. Our so-called "the third party company", after further investigation, is actually not a company but an individual person. Due to the personal reasons, the previous experimental data were lost and the original raw data could not be provided. So we can not guarantee the authenticity of those data provided by that person. Some members are considering to repeat the experiment again, but we have no way to raise enough fund to repeat it. Hence after serious discussion, we decided to withdraw the manuscript. Again we apologize sincerely for your inconvenience."

FatalLogic 5y ago
It's an interesting story but there seems to be no connection to the OP. It's a different field, different researchers, from a different institution. What's the connection?
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  Seriously. I was looking for one myself. The only thing I can think of is that he noticed they both have Chinese names. Nice

nabla9 5y ago

The effect size and it's duration is not that high. They found small effect that lasted a month and faded away quickly afterwards.

qwerty456127 5y ago

I'm curious, doesn't Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment contribute to oxidative stress? What happens if someone does it regularly?

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

What happened with the lsd microdosing treatment of Alzheimer? Did it do any good? Are there any follow ups on that one? There are some articles from august of last year that mention the idea, but I don't know if the trials were successful. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsyn.2020.00034/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsyn.2020.0003... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973482/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973482/