Aging: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy may effectively reverse the body's aging process at the cellular level

7, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Aging, scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel and other institutions said that high-pressure oxygen therapy (HBOT, hyperbaric oxygen treatment) for healthy aging adults may block the aging of their body's blood cells and reverse the body's aging process.
Researchers found that special treatments using hyperbaric oxygen in pressure silos may reverse two major body physiological processes associated with aging and disease, namely the shortening of telomeres (the protective area at the end of each chromosome) and the accumulation of aging and dysfunctional cells in the body, by focusing on immune cells containing DNA in the patient's blood, and found that the accumulation of chromosomes in cells increased by 38 percent and reduced the accumulation of senescies by 37 percent.
'For many years, our research team has been working on high-pressure research and the development of its therapies based on exposure to different concentrations of high-pressure oxygen in the pressure chamber,' explains Professor Efrati.
photo Source: PD-NASA; In the current PD-USGOV-NASA study, researchers wanted to analyze the effects of HBOT on healthy, independent older adults and whether the treatment could slow, block, and even reverse the body's normal aging process at the cellular level.
Researchers analyzed 60 hyperbaric oxygen sessions on 35 healthy elderly individuals aged 64 and older over a 90-day study, each providing blood samples for analysis before, during, after treatment, and over a period of time after treatment, and then analyzed the levels of multiple immune cells in the blood sample and compared the results.
-related studies have shown that this therapy can actually reverse the body's aging process in two main ways, first, telomeres at the end of chromosomes grow 20%-38% longer and not shorter, depending on the cell type, and the proportion of senescing cells in the overall cell population is significantly reduced by 11%-37%, depending on the cell type.
the researchers point out that telomere shortening is now considered the "holy grail" in aging biology research, and researchers from around the world are trying to develop pharmacological or environmental interventions to promote telomere extension, and that the HBOT therapy used by the researchers in this paper may be able to achieve telomere extension, proving that the body's aging process can actually be reversed at the underlying cellular molecular level.
Finally, the researchers said that so far, interventions such as lifestyle changes and increased exercise have been able to suppress the effects of telomere shortening to some extent, but in this study, the use of HBOT therapy alone for three months may be able to effectively extend chromosome telomeres, and the speed of the interventions or lifestyle changes currently in use, based on this groundbreaking study, the next step researchers will continue to study and analyze the cellular effects of HBOT and its potential to reverse the body aging process.
() Original source: Yafit Hachmo et al, Hyperbaric oxygen therapy increases telomere length and solutions immunosenescence in isolated blood cells: a prospective trial, Aging (2020). DOI:10.18632/aging.202188。