Can hyperbaric oxygen therapy help autistic kids?

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Can hyperbaric oxygen therapy help autistic kids?

....And I am somewhat skeptical too...

Brain needs oxygen. More oxygen = more thinking, ergo better able to cope with anything - from math tests to socializing.

more oxygen means more anxiety also...

...no. It's not that simple.

For example, you need a couple of liters of water a day. You can get some from food, of course; but you have to get somewhere around that much or you'll start to have problems. So you'd think "Two liters are good; so I'm going to make it even better--I'll drink ten!"... Or not. Chances are with ten liters you'd knock your body's electrolytes off balance--you'd end up with too little sodium and potassium in your body, because you'd been diluting them with water.

That's true with a lot of things. You need only so much, and not more.

Some things have better safety margins than others, of course. Kids have died from an overdose of iron from multivitamins; but another nutrient, vitamin C, has never been known to kill anyone and at extremely high doses only causes diarrhea.

The brain doesn't need just oxygen, by the way. It also needs glucose. Glucose is the sugar you find in grapes, and is just one chemical step away from sucrose (glucose+glucose=sucrose), which is table sugar. But you don't see anybody overdosing on sugar trying to get their brains to work better, do you? Sure, a box of raisins or a cup of juice works great to replenish your energy on long-term study sessions, but that's because you're running low on glucose, not because you're overloading on it in an attempt to turbocharge your brain.

There's only one thing I know of that actually does turbocharge your brain--norepinephrine. When your body goes into fight-or-flight mode, that is one of the neurotransmitters that spikes; and it puts you on alert. Of course, constantly going into fight-or-flight isn't a good idea--the effects of long-term stress are well-documented. There are chemical ways to affect norepinephrine directly without also releasing epinephrine, which is what creates the stronger physical fight-or-flight; stimulants do it, and so do some antidepressants. Cocaine does it, too, at a few thousand times the strength of the legal stimulants. Physical injury triggers the same response, and (obviously) so does real or perceived risk or danger. Watch a gambler--you'll see all the signs of norepinephrine in action.

Oxygen, though? That's only necessary if your brain actually isn't getting enough oxygen, and the signs of that are pretty obvious, because long before your brain starts getting oxygen starved your body is starting to conserve oxygen by not sending it to other areas. That's why your lips get blue when you haven't had enough air, and why your skin gets cold. It'll start to try to restore homeostasis in other ways, too--you'll start breathing faster and gasping for air, and you'll feel weak as your body tries to keep you from exerting yourself and burning ATP in your muscle tissue. If you don't see those signs, and there isn't carbon monoxide poisoning in the picture (CO poisoning fools the brain into thinking it does have enough oxygen), then there isn't an oxygen deficiency.

Right, oxygen toxicity is possible at high pressures, which I guess hyperbaric oxygen treatment could produce if handled by "cure autism" fanatics.



Right, all those crazy nerds drink pop and eat candy because the want to get diabetes type II so they can be cool.



Lips blue, skin cold, gasping for air... you mean that's not normal?

The atmospheric oxygen levels may be lower than what is "natural" thanks to fossil fuels - where do you think all that co2 came from? Now they want to fix it by putting all our oxygen underground (in the form of co2) with this "carbon sequestration" scheme. I'm a little apprehensive.

Add poor ventilation in many buildings, and I suspect a lot of people are getting less oxygen than they should. I set up my computer near a wide open window, and noticed a big difference.

I live in a pit of a city, really, we are up to 27 foot below sea level. One, everything heavier than air on the planet settles here and stays, we have oil refineries, and two, sixty miles north, and above sea level, is pine forests.

One hour north and it is like a double espresso, I get a sudden uplift that continues. I go there to hike, and my energy level gets very high. Body energy, hunger, clear thought, it is good.

In Japan they have oxygen in bars, the range is from 15% in some cities to 24% in deep forests. I get high on trees.

I have heard stories of people in hospitals in oxygen tents who snuck out to the balcony for a smoke and turned into a ball of flame, so watch it with 100%, welders know this problem.

Long hikes in deep forests can help autistic kids.

It sounds like an expensive bs therapy...

It would probably help autistic kids who have carbon monoxide poisoning or divers bends.

But usually hyperbaric oxygen isn't indicated, or even normobaric oxygen, because they can just breather the oxygen in the regular air, and there's more than they would actually use.

At the same time, it is possible that some as-yet poorly defined co-morbidity makes hyperbaric oygen useful in a a small subset of the autistic population.

Th only benefit I really see for anyone is that the oxygen itself isn't polluted, you don't get all this extra crap. But other then that...

I'm skeptical as to whether it's the oxygen causing the effects, or if it's the hours spent in that nice relaxing confined isolation.
This is coming from a fan of sensory deprivation tanks. It's the only thing that got me through my final term of undergrad.

Sensory deprivation tanks do artificially what meditation does naturally, but of course you do have to learn the meditation.

I can see that unpolluted air might help. Air has gotten bad enough in some cities that people wear masks to keep the smog out of their lungs (mostly places like Tokyo, with really high population density). City air certainly does no good for kids with asthma and allergies. Hyperbaric oxygen isn't the answer for that, though; moving out of the city, and to an area with a low pollen/mold count, is.

Yes--there's enough oxygen in the air in the cities. It's the extra stuff that's also there that causes problems.

You know how, when you move to a high-altitude area, you suddenly have trouble running and your breathing rate goes up? That's the effects of mild oxygen deprivation. But after a week or more, you start to adjust to it. Your body makes more red blood cells, so that more oxygen gets absorbed in the capillaries in your lungs. People are made to adjust to different levels of oxygen. Oh yeah--and you can lose those extra red blood cells if you go back to a lower altitude. Exposure to high pressure basically makes the body figure, "Oh, okay, I can make less red blood cells; there's more oxygen to pick up in the lungs now, so why bother with the extra effort?" Which is why, after returning to your low-altitude area, you have to readjust to the high altitude if you return there after any real length of time spent away. Hyperbaric oxygen may be counterproductive, in that way, if used long-term.

There's also the fact that if oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher, we'd have such rampant brush fires that plant life would never have survived, and animal life died out, long ago. So there's an upper limit on how much O2 could've been there in the past.

Good point.

When I read an article about this last night, the part where they mentioned the fact that the kids in the greater pressure seemed to like it jumped out at me. Well, duh! Austic people like pressure! It was obvious that they didn't know much about autism.

This is just expensive snake oil.

I doubt if it will do any good, oxygen poisoning can damge the lungs and eyes. I am unsure of how much O2 at what preasure will cause injury but I would advise caution.

I not not think that by increasing the amount of O2 in the air that the brain will work better.

Off-topic, but andriarose, where do you use the tank? I've always wanted to try one, but don't know anywhere in NI that has them.

I haven't found anywhere in NI yet, I lived in London up until a few months ago and used to go to FloatWorks. It's a shame, I really miss it.

There have been so many fads. Isn't this just like chelation therapy in a way? Get the bad stuff out, get the good stuff in . . .