An Israeli doctor says he has discovered how to “reverse” aging in the brain and has successfully tried it on volunteers. The answer, he says, has been right in front of our noses all this time: oxygen.
Shai Efrati claims that he discovered that when healthy adults over 65 received special oxygen therapy, their cognitive function improved and so did brain tissue function.
“It reverses aging,” said Efrati, an associate professor at Tel Aviv University and a senior physician at the Shamir Medical Center in Tzrifin, near Rishon Lezion. “It improves cognitive function and not only slows your decline.”
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“This is the first time, as far as I know, that there is a biological intervention that improves brain biology in the normal aging population. The decline that comes with aging does not need to be taken as given, “Efrati told The Times of Israel.
Hyperbaric chambers at the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research at the Shamir Medical Center (courtesy of the Sagol Center)
One of the volunteers in his experiment, Avi Rabinovitch, 69, said that “he entered this study healthy and left him like a tiger,” adding that his memory and cognition have improved.
Efrati recruited 63 people over the age of 65, underwent an MRI and tested their cognitive skills. She then gave some of them a 60-day treatment during which they spent 2-hour periods in a pressurized chamber five times a week, breathing in pure oxygen for part of the time.
Professor Shai Efrati of the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research at Shamir Medical Center (courtesy of the Sagol Center)
At the end of the experiment, those who did not enter the hyperbaric chamber had MRI results similar to those at the start, and a similar cognitive ability. But Efrati reported a significant difference in those who received the oxygen therapy, and found the improvements made in the tests six months later.
“In these people, magnetic resonance imaging showed that tissue function in the brain, in areas associated with cognitive decline, had improved, and we also found significant improvement in cognitive function,” he said, noting that staff who performs the evaluations not knowing which patients had received the therapy.
Efrati’s study was published Wednesday, after a peer review, in the journal Aging. A company he co-founded, Aviv Scientific, has been developing oxygen therapy programs for healthy adults and working on marketing since 2017, and began offering private sessions in the United States last month. Aviv has a clinic in Florida and plans to open another in Dubai by the end of the year.
Norm O’Rourke, an unrelated research senior mental health expert, told The Times of Israel that he believes the study is “compelling.”
O’Rourke, a professor at the Ben Gurion University School of Public Health, praised the fact that the results used two separate parameters, cognitive ability and the results of brain magnetic resonance imaging. O’Rourke said: “It is very interesting because not only did they do the neurocognitive tests, but they also have physiological data on cerebral blood flow, so the two sets of findings are corroborated.”
He added: “The sample size is not huge, but for a first study it is not necessarily problematic.”
Hillel Aviezer, a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not involved in the study, commented: “This is an interesting study with some promising preliminary results. However, there is still a margin of caution when interpreting the results. Specifically, the control group did not undergo any intervention, while the hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) group experienced a very intense meeting protocol for several days a week, for several months.
“The weekly structured meetings of the HBOT group, the social interactions with the evaluators, and the natural effects of the placebo may have contributed to improving the attention and processing speed found in the results. Still, the study provides a good step forward, and we hope it will trigger future work with more controlled double-blind experimental designs. ”
Patient wearing a mask while receiving hyperbaric oxygen therapy (iStock)
The idea of giving pure oxygen as therapy is not new, and hyperbaric chambers can be found worldwide to treat conditions including decompression sickness, air embolism, and thermal burns.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved therapy for all three of these conditions and 10 others, but urges people to handle claims for other uses with caution, and also warns that camera use can carry risks of joint pain and even paralysis. She raised concerns that hyperbaric therapy has been “promoted” as a “universal treatment.”
Efrati is director of one of the world’s largest hyperbaric medicine centers, the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research in Shamir, which treats more than 200 patients daily.
He said that healthy adults in his study received oxygen in the chamber according to a start-stop schedule developed to treat patients at his Israel-based clinic suffering from wounds, burns and other conditions.
Efrati said that this protocol generates significant fluctuations in blood oxygen, and suggested that the intermittent increase in oxygen concentration induces many of the cellular mediators and mechanisms necessary for regeneration. He said this means that oxygen fluctuation induces a regenerative mechanism that is generally induced during hypoxia, the lack of oxygen. But his therapy protocol “tricks” the body into a state of hypoxia without being dangerous.
He decided to try this protocol on healthy adults because, as people age, blood vessels carry less oxygen to the brain, and he believes that hyperbaric treatment makes up for this.
“Occlusion of small blood vessels, similar to occlusions that can develop in the pipes of an ‘aging’ house, is a dominant element in the human aging process,” he said. “This led us to speculate that hyperbaric oxygen therapy may affect brain performance in the aging population.”
