The quest to look and feel younger, and learn how and why we age has been going on for hundreds of years, maybe longer. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has shown great promise for a number of conditions. But the results of one study that was published in 2020, shows a connection to hyperbaric oxygen’s affect on aging markers and has more than a few scientists raising their eyebrows.
The study from Tel Aviv University and the Shamir Medical Center in Israel indicates that hyperbaric oxygen treatments may help affect the aging process at the cellular level. In the study, researchers selected 35 healthy, independently living adults, all age 64 or older. The individuals completed a series of 60 hyperbaric dives, or sessions, over a 90 day period. Each participant provided blood samples before starting treatment, after 30 and 60 dives and again 1-2 weeks after their final dive.
To understand the findings, we first have to understand a couple other terms that deal with aging at the cellular level. The first are telomeres.
A telomere is a part of DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes. They protect the ends of chromosomes from becoming damaged. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become shorter. Eventually, telomeres become so short, the cell can no longer divide.
When the cell can no longer divide successfully, the cell dies.
The other term to understand is senescent cells. Remember how long the search for answers to aging has been going on? Well, in 1961, a couple of researchers tried an experiment to see if human cells could divide indefinitely in a lab dish. You can guess the findings. The cells did not continue to replicate, instead they slowed in their division and entered a dormant stage. These are senescent cells. They’re not dead, but they’ve stopped dividing.
The ends of telomeres serve to protect the coding DNA of the genome. When a telomeres shorten to critical lengths, the cells senesce and die off.
Back to the study out of Israel. You can read a good summary here. But at the end, blood tests revealed that telomeres actually grew longer, at a rate of 20%-38%. And the percentage of senescent cells in the overall population was reduced anywhere from 11% to 37% depending on cell type!
We know that everything that happens in our body, one way or another, starts at the cellular level. That makes this research so promising and certainly opens the door for more research into the role hyperbaric oxygen treatments play in aging markers, but also in the age-old quest for answers into aging.