Oxygen Provides New Hope for Brain Injured Soldiers

In early December 2008, the Department of Defense with the Navy as lead agency sponsored a conference on the healing effects of 100 percent oxygen under pressure on brain-injured patients.  The procedure is called Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, or HBOT.   Though this conference generally went unnoticed in the national media, the importance of the developments discussed cannot be overstated.

What underscores the significance of this conference is that Traumatic Brain Injury, or TBI, is the “signature” injury for those serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom (OIF/OEF), the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.   The extensive use of improvised explosive devises (IED) by the enemy has resulted in a significant number of brain-injured combat veterans of OIF/OEF.  A study by the RAND Corporation released in April 2008 titled Invisible Wounds of War:  Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery puts the number of returning soldiers who could be suffering from mild to severe TBI as high as 320,000.  Recent application of HBOT has produced very promising results, giving real hope to those suffering from TBI.

The Department of Defense’s “Wounded, Ill and Injured” program has stressed ensuring the best medical treatment possible for service members returning from OIF/OEF. It has put a priority on assessing the efficacy of HBOT.  HBOT is an important initiative to provide the most effective treatment for soldiers suffering from brain injuries back to living normal lives, but there is another important consideration.

Getting soldiers back on their feet and fit for duty with a treatment regimen that is a relatively inexpensive is good government.   The money that would have gone for more traditional and expensive treatments of the brain-injured now can be used to fund other medically urgent injuries and illnesses.

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Hyperbaric Treatment Center at the Whitaker Wellness Center

In the news….

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Hyperbarics in the news

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/jan/14/na-can-hyperbaric-oxygen-ease-pressures-of-war

Ankarlo’s wife, Ashley, said that when her husband returned from Fallujah he seemed “pretty much like himself,” but he soon became withdrawn and agitated. “He slept with a knife,” she said. “It got to the point where we’d be out driving and you’d see him check every window in every building we passed. There’s not a guy that went to Fallujah that didn’t come home like that.” She said treatments her husband received through the Department of Veterans Affairs – “a slew of different medications” – did nothing to relieve his cognitive difficulties, debilitating depression and severe anxiety. In December, a friend told the couple about a treatment doctors are using across the country with great success to treat people with brain injuries: hyperbaric oxygen therapy. The treatment isn’t cheap, however. Each sequence of visits to a hyperbaric chamber can cost thousands of dollars, and the Ankarlo’s military insurance would not pay for it. “The VA is sadly way behind the civilian sector on the latest treatments for brain injury,” Ashley Ankarlo said. Two weeks ago, Adam Ankarlo, 27, and his friend, 26-year-old retired Marine Cpl. Chad Allcox, took their first “dive” in hyperbaric chambers at National Hyperbaric-Tampa Bay in Palm Harbor. Center owner Allan Spiegel waived his fee for the treatment, and the nonprofit Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund is putting up the two men in a nearby rental condo for the duration of their therapy. They will undergo twice-daily treatments for several more weeks. The Food and Drug Administration has not approved the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for the treatment of brain injuries or neurological disorders. It is commonly used to help heal wounds from surgery, injury, disease or infection, but Spiegel and many other doctors report remarkable success using it “off label.”

We will be posting the story of the Veteran that was treated at the Hyperbaric Treatment Center in Newport Beach soon.