Researchers Report First Successful Treatment of Chronic Traumatic Br...( ARLINGTON Va. Oct. 11 /- The Amer...),Health

ARLINGTON, Va., Oct. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Association of Health Freedom and the International Hyperbaric Medical Association announced today that physician-researchers at the Baromedical Research Institute and Louisiana State University School of Medicine, New Orleans have reported the successful treatment of chronic traumatic brain injury (TBI). The findings, published in Brain Research (2007 Oct 12;1174:120-9), are purportedly the first-ever demonstration of improvement of chronic brain injury in animals. The treatment involved a new application and drug dosage of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has been applied to diving injuries, carbon monoxide poisoning, "flesh-eating bacteria," and chronic wounds. Application to chronic brain injury is controversial. This demonstration is a landmark achievement that reverses 100 years of neurology and the institutionalized belief that chronic brain injury in untreatable. It has significant implications for the treatment of chronic human traumatic brain injury (TBI) such as for current U.S. military veterans.

Lead author, Paul G. Harch, M.D., Clinical Assistant Professor, Director of the LSU School of Medicine Hyperbaric Medicine Fellowship in New Orleans, and author of recently published The Oxygen Revolution (Hatherleigh Press, NY), said that he made this discovery when he first applied HBOT to divers with a disabling form of "the bends," brain decompression illness. Harch noticed that the traditional application of a single HBOT to freshly injured divers did not result in the immediate cure described by the U.S. Navy. Instead, divers from the Gulf of Mexico presented days to weeks after their injury and required much more HBOT at a lower pressure. Eventually, he realized that they were treating more chronic forms of brain injury since the bubbles had long passed through the divers' brains. Harch and colleagues applied this lower dose of HBOT to patients with other forms of chroni
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