If you try to tell William Duncan, PhD, that there is no treatment for brain injuries, he’ll offer a dissenting opinion.

A new study published in the October issue of Brain Research describes the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) to treat traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Duncan, senior VP of Capitol Hill Consulting Group (Washington), says he has seen first-hand what the therapy can do for patients with brain injuries. Paul Harch, MD, the lead author of the study has used the therapy to treat Duncan’s 44-year-old mentally disabled brother, his 23-year-old son who was discharged from the Navy with a brain injury, and even Duncan himself, who suffered from TBI as a result of childhood abuse.

Thus, it’s not surprising that Duncan, who represents clients in the education, healthcare and biomedical arenas for Capitol Hill Consulting Group, calls Harch a “miracle worker.”

“You see miracles happen when you treat an oxygen-deprived injury with oxygen,” Duncan told Medical Device Daily. “It shouldn’t be rocket science, but it actually is rocket science.”

The study was done by physician-researchers at the Baromedical Research Institute (BRI) and Louisiana State University School of Medicine (New Orleans), according to the American Association of Health Freedom (AAHF; Arlington, Virginia) and the International Hyperbaric Medical Association (IHMA; Santa Fe, New Mexico).

According to Sechrist (Anaheim, California), a company that makes hyperbaric technology, HBOT is a treatment in which the patient is entirely enclosed in a pressure chamber breathing 100% pure oxygen at greater than one atmosphere pressure. Air, in comparison, contains nearly 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen. The company said HBOT can deliver nearly 15 times as much oxygen as there is in air at normal pressure.

“The key to this is saturating to body with oxygen and using the oxygen as a drug,” Duncan said.

The study findings are reportedly 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. HBOT has been applied to diving injuries, carbon monoxide poisoning, flesh-eating bacteria and chronic wounds. Application to chronic brain injury is controversial.

According to the AAHF and the IHMA, 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 TBI, including the treatment of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Harch, a clinical assistant professor and director of the LSU School of Medicine Hyperbaric Medicine Fellowship in New Orleans, said he made this discovery when he first applied HBOT to divers with a disabling form of “the bends,” brain decompression illness. He noticed that the traditional application of a single HBOT session to freshly injured divers did not result in the immediate cure described by the 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, Harch realized that they were treating more chronic forms of brain injury because the bubbles had long passed through the divers’ brains. Harch and colleagues applied this lower dose of HBOT to patients with other forms of chronic brain injury, including trauma, cerebral palsy, autism, toxic brain injury, dementia and multiple other diagnoses.

Duncan said his brother saw a 50% increase in his intelligence and a “much higher quality of life” after Harch treated him with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. He also noticed a huge difference in his son who, after undergoing 40 HBOT treatments, turned his life around by becoming steadily employed (which, as a result of the injury, he was struggling to do prior to the treatment) and got married.

“I have yet to see a patient with a brain injury who didn’t see some type of improvement [from HBOT],” Duncan said.

Harch said that when he presented his human case experience at scientific meetings from 1992 to 1999 he was criticized for lack of an animal model. As a result, he adapted the Feeney model of acute traumatic brain injury to chronic brain injury and applied his human protocol of HBOT. Harch and colleagues were able to show in Brain Research that they could improve cognition (spatial learning and memory) while increasing blood vessel density in the damaged hippocampus of the rats.

Chronic TBI affects more than 5 million Americans. Costs of treating it exceed $60 billion a year in the U.S. alone. As many as 400,000 U.S. troops have been exposed to blast injuries and could have varying degrees of TBI.