as a physical Shanghai therapist Zheng Wang has treated people recovering from strokes whose brains have been damaged by oxygen deprivation. They usually followed a predictable pattern of recovery and made a lot of progress in their first few visits, but then hit a wall. Patients asked when he would finally feel normal, and Wang said it would get better over time. “But really, I knew deep down that no matter how hard I tried, they weren’t going to improve that much,” he recalls.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Mark Dalecki, then an associate professor of athletics at Louisiana State University (LSU), couldn’t help but think about oxygen. Dalecki spent much of his early career studying scuba diving, and he used nasal cannulas of O2 to help divers deal with everything from hypoxia to headaches. I remember He always wondered if this simple treatment could help rehabilitate patients with neurological disorders. “I promised myself that if I got my own lab, I would work on it,” he says.
Despite its relatively small size, the brain consumes a staggering amount of electricity at rest, 20-30 percent of the body’s energy. The brain depends on oxygen to supply energy to all neurons. A stroke or head injury blocks the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the brain. A lack of oxygen damages brain tissue and causes many problems with memory, language, muscle strength, and motor control.
Rehabilitation from a brain injury usually involves working with a physical therapist to relearn motor skills and develop the strength and coordination needed for daily activities such as making coffee, writing, and brushing teeth. included. Many physiotherapists are already using high-tech equipment to help patients recover faster, from robots that move impaired limbs to virtual reality games that simulate aspects of daily life that cannot easily be replicated in hospitals. increase. But both Wang and Dalecki wondered if oxygen could be the simple, cheap, accessible addition to the neurological rehabilitation they were looking for. . They reasoned that if patients could be given a little extra oxygen during the initial motor rehabilitation sessions, they might be able to relearn old skills more quickly.
The two joined forces in LSU’s Dalecki lab, where Wang, a frustrated clinician, decided to pursue a doctorate in kinesiology.and study published last week frontiers of neuroscience, Their team showed that sniffing pure oxygen while learning a difficult motor task made healthy young people learn faster and perform better. They believe this relatively low-cost, low-risk idea could be used to speed up stroke recovery.
For the study, they recruited 40 healthy young people, each wearing a nasal cannula and sitting at a desk. Their instructions were simple. Hold the stylus in the center of the tablet screen and drag it to a target that pops up elsewhere as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, after a few tries, the relationship between the stylus and the screen changed, causing him a 60-degree difference between the lines of the participants. idea The lines they drew and the lines that actually appeared on the screen. Air began to flow through the cannula while the volunteers adjusted the delineation to these new, more difficult conditions. Half of the participants were supplied with pure oxygen and the other half with medical air (essentially an ultra-clean version of normal air). It was only a few minutes of the first learning, but it flew by. Then the airflow stopped and the screen returned to normal.
