Episode 159: Can Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) Improve Capacity in ME/CFS?

Okay.

So the paper itself was called Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Improves Clinical Symptoms and Functional Capacity and Modulates Thalamic Connectivity, that's connectivity in a certain region of the brain, in ME-CFS, a prospective cohort study.

So that's the title of the paper.

And as I said, it was published June 2026.

And if you head over to my website or you check out the show notes for this episode, I'll have a link to the paper there as well, if you'd like to review it for yourself.

First of all, let's just talk about what hyperbaric oxygen therapy is, or we can summarize it as HBOT.

Basically, what this is, is it involves breathing 100% oxygen in a pressurized chamber.

Typically, this is 1.5 to 2.5 times normal atmospheric pressure.

And these conditions permit a significant increment of the oxygen supply to the blood and to the tissues without the contribution from hemoglobin.

So basically, it just helps to saturate the body with oxygen.

And this may potentially aid in conditions where improving oxygen delivery can support recovery.

And as you may or may not know, at this point in time, we make energy in the presence of oxygen.

So we need energy for the general functioning of the body.

We need energy for healing.

We need energy for healing.

every possible thing that we need to do in our body.

And so if we don't have oxygen or we don't have the energy because we don't have the oxygen for these bodily functions to work really well, then that can impact our health as a whole.

So it's hypothesized that through this effect of saturating the body with oxygen, H-parts can elicit a cascade of cellular responses that collectively may address many of the pathophysiological aspects of ME-CFS.

And so what this really says in very simple terms is that this hydrobaric oxygen therapy can cause changes on a cellular level that might address some of the physiological imbalances that have been associated with conditions such as ME-CFS.

So this isn't the first research paper that has investigated hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Previous research has had its limitations and therefore produced mixed results.

So following the COVID-19 pandemic, several studies, including one randomized control trial, found And also a case series investigated the potential effects of HBART on post-COVID syndrome, which is known to have overlapping pathophysiology with ME-CFS.

That's something that I've talked about previously on the podcast, I think in the glutamate episode.

So overall, the findings consistently showed improvements in quality of life, fatigue, cognitive function, neuropsychiatric symptoms, and cardiopulmonary function.

So if you're someone with one of these conditions, whether that's on COVID or post-COVID syndrome, ME-CFS, you would probably want improvement in quality of life, improvement in fatigue, improvement in cognitive function, and improvement in neurodegenerative psychiatric symptoms if you have such symptoms and cardiopulmonary symptoms if you have such symptoms.