Scientific Discoveries
Hyperbaric oxygen (HBO2) is used for a therapeutic treatment in which patients breathes in 100% oxygen in a pressurized chamber. It has been approved to treat many clinical conditions. Clinical observations and pre-clinical research has shown that this treatment also produces pain relief. The research I did during my Ph.D. training was focused on studying the pain relieving effect of HBO2 treatment and its neural mechanism, and during these studies I made some meaningful and interesting discoveries:
- HBO2 treatment produces lasting pain relief in experimental rats with inflammatory pain or chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain. Repeated treatments can prolong the relief even further.
- HBO2 treatment can produce pain relief by triggering a neural pathway shared by opioid painkillers. While repeated use of opioid painkillers may lead to reduced effect and even drug abuse, repeated HBO2 treatments do not appear to have similar drawbacks, making it a promising candidate for better pain treatment.
- Another benefit of HBO2 treatment is that it relieves some physiological signs of drug withdrawal in experimental mice that have become physically dependent on opioids. This finding sits among the first pre-clinical evidence showing that HBO2 may be useful in preventing patients of opioid use disorder from relapse, thus helping them recover.