An Israeli doctor says he can successfully "reverse" aging of the brain with the use of oxygen, The Times of Israel reports.
Shai Efrati said he has found that when healthy adults over the age of 65 were given a special oxygen therapy, their cognitive function improved along with their brain's tissue function.
"It reverses aging," Efrati, a Tel Aviv University associate professor and a senior doctor at the Shamir Medical Center, told The Times of Israel about his treatment. "It improves cognitive function, and doesn't just slow its decline."
One of the volunteers in the study, published Wednesday, Avi Rabinovitch said he "entered this study healthy, and left it a tiger." He said he has seen improvement to his memory and cognition.
"This is the first time, from what I know, that there is biological intervention that improves the biology of the brain in the normal aging population," Efrati said. "The decline that comes with aging doesn't need to be taken as given."
To test his theory, the doctor recruited 63 people over the age of 65 for a study. Their cognitive abilities were tested and they were given MRI scans. He gave some of them a 60-day course of treatment during which they spent 2-hour stints in a pressurized chamber five times a week, breathing pure oxygen for a period of time.
At the end of the experiment, those who did not receive the oxygen treatment had similar MRI results and cognitive ability as they did at the start of the study. But patients who received the therapy showed improvements in tests conducted six months later.
"In these people, MRI scans showed that tissue function in the brain, in areas associated with cognitive decline, had improved, and we also found a significant improvement in cognitive function," he said.
An expert on the mental health of seniors, Norm O'Rourke, told The Times of Israel he thinks the study is "compelling."
"It's very interesting because not only did they do the neurocognitive tests, they also have physiological data on brain blood flow, so the two sets of findings corroborate each other," he said of the study, which looked at the MRI scans and cognitive ability.
Efrati is the director of one of the world's largest hyperbaric medicine centers, Shamir's Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research, which treats more than 200 patients daily.
He said he decided to start the study because as people age, blood vessels carry less oxygen to the brain. He said he thinks the treatment can help with that.
"The occlusion of small blood vessels, similar to the occlusions which may develop in the pipes of an ‘aging' home, is a dominant element in the human aging process," he said. "This led us to speculate that hyperbaric oxygen therapy may affect brain performance of the aging population."
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