Long COVID Symptoms and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Chris Sass
1 day ago
4 min read

How can HBOT help your healing and recovery process from COVID?

If you are suffering from neurological symptoms, there are many areas to focus on during the healing and recovery process. Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) has emerged as an important therapy in the healing post-COVID symptoms. Let's dive into some of the mechanisms and the benefits that HBOT therapy has to offer for long COVID patients.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy — Hyperbaric Oxygen can improve brain function!

Long COVID fatigue is a common symptom was reported in 77% of the study’s patients. The pathogenesis of long COVID in the central nervous system includes direct neuronal injury in the frontal lobes, chronic injury mediated by glial cells, ischemic events mediated by thrombotic events, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. Growing evidence shows that new HBOT protocols can induce neuroplasticity and improve brain function even months to years after the acute injury. HBOT treatment can modulate the immune system, promote angiogenesis, restore mitochondrial function and induce neurogenesis in injured brain tissue. Some or all of these effects may explain the beneficial effects found in current research.

One study by Robbins et al. reported a significant improvement in fatigue following HBOT sessions in long COVID patients. Another review article published in the European Journal of Medical Research showed promising results of hyperbaric therapy on COVID symptoms. Eight articles from three countries were included. All the included studies had good and fair quality scores, with no poor studies included in this systematic review (Good: n = 5, Fair: n = 3). Studies were divided into clinical trials and case reports/series. Most of the studies used HBOT less than 1.5–2 absolute atmospheres (ATA) for 90 min sessions and thereafter sessions were decreased to 60 minutes. Trials demonstrated most of the patients recovered after receiving HBOT, and blood oxygen saturation increased after several sessions of HBOT.

HBOT yielded a statistically significant improvement in the Chalder fatigue scale (p=0.0059; d=1.75 (very large)), global cognition (p=0.0137; d=–1.07 (large)), executive function (p=0.0039; d=–1.06 (large)), attention (p=0.0020; d=–1.2 (very large)), information processing (p=0.0059; d=–1.25 (very large)) and verbal function (p=0.0098; d=–0.92 (large)). They concluded that the results presented here suggest potential benefits of HBOT from long COVID-related fatigue, with statistically significant results following 10 sessions. I think that these are important findings suggesting a possible positive effect of HBOT on the common long COVID-related symptoms of fatigue and ‘brain fog’.

The mechanism of long COVID is still uncertain.1 One possible hypothesis is that the wide variety of changes that characterise long COVID are a result of prolonged tissue hypoxia. This is frequently the common denominator for many diseases that are responsive to HBOT. Further research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms of long COVID and positive responses seen in relation to HBOT.1

The main cognitive impairment in post-COVID-19 condition is brain fog, with considerable implications for occupational, psychological, and functional outcomes. In this study, improvements in the memory domain was in both groups, which can be attributed to the natural course of the disease. However, executive function and attention improved only following HBOT. It seems that the improvement following HBOT may be attributed to the increases in cerebral blood flow.

While long COVID has been associated with long term psychiatric symptoms including depression, anxiety, and somatization, HBOT improved both depression and somatization symptoms. The association between improvements in the psychiatric symptoms to the MRI changes in the study gave further strength to the biological nature of this disease and HBOT’s effect. HBOT was also shown to improve pain interference. Diffuse muscle and joint pain without local inflammation is one of the common symptoms of post-COVID-19, resembling other central sensitization syndromes, such as fibromyalgia. A growing number of clinical studies, have demonstrated the efficacy of HBOT in improving pain and quality of life of fibromyalgia patients. Previous studies have shown that fibromyalgia is associated with decreased brain perfusion in the insula, hippocampus, putamen, prefrontal and cingulate cortex. In the current study, these regions showed increased perfusion after HBOT.

In conclusion, HBOT can improve executive functions, psychiatric symptoms (depression, anxiety and somatization), pain interference symptoms and fatigue of patients suffering from post-COVID-19 condition. The beneficial effect can be attributed to increased brain perfusion and neuroplasticity in regions associated with cognitive and emotional roles.

Source:

Paganini, Matteo, et al. "The role of hyperbaric oxygen treatment for COVID-19: a review." Medical and Biomedical Updates (2021): 27-35.

Oliaei, Shahram, et al. "The effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) on coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19): a systematic review." European journal of medical research 26.1 (2021): 1-12.

Robbins, Tim, et al. "Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for the treatment of long COVID: early evaluation of a highly promising intervention." Clinical Medicine 21.6 (2021): e629.

Zilberman-Itskovich, Shani, et al. "Hyperbaric oxygen therapy improves neurocognitive functions and symptoms of post-COVID condition: randomized controlled trial." Scientific Reports 12.1 (2022): 11252.

Kjellberg, Anders, Antonio De Maio, and Peter Lindholm. "Can hyperbaric oxygen safely serve as an anti-inflammatory treatment for COVID-19?." Medical Hypotheses 144 (2020): 110224.

Our mission at Great Lakes Functional Neurology is to help you understand your injury and get you back to normal, healthy living. We strive to equip you with the tools needed for a full neurological recovery. If you would like to know more, we would be happy to discuss our services in more detail with you. You can reach us at (616)-581-1558 or visit our website at www.greatlakesneurology.com and schedule a complimentary phone consult with one of our doctors.

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