Power substance: oxygen

If you have resolved to do more for your own health in 2021, you should start with your cells. And the best way to do that is to put oxygen at the top of your to-do list. Under certain circumstances, oxygen can even reverse the aging process of blood cells.

It should be common knowledge that the human body generates energy by burning oxygen and that oxygen is therefore a basic requirement for our life. But what power really lies behind this element and how intensively it can influence our lives has now been discovered by scientists at the Tel Aviv University and the Shamir Medical Center in Israel.

They are working on the so-called hyperbaric oxygen therapy in pressure chambers (HBO). This procedure has been known since the 1960s and is used as a form of therapy for diseases that are due to a lack of oxygen in the cells in the cells. These include, for example, diabetic foot syndrome and acute hearing disorders. During the therapy, medical oxygen is supplied to the patients in a pressure chamber via a tube system. This increases the amount of oxygen in the liquid components of the blood.

In their experiments, however, the researchers have now discovered that much more can be achieved by increasing oxygen saturation in the blood. In the paper published in the scientific journal "Aging" at the end of 2020, they explain that with the help of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the pressure chamber, they succeeded in reducing the not only stop the aging process of blood cells in healthy adults, but even reverse it.!

Influence of oxygen on aging

In the 90-day study, 35 healthy people over 64 years of age received 60 HBO sessions, during which the ambient pressure was set at 2.4 to 3 times the normal pressure. Blood samples were taken from the subjects before, during, and immediately after treatment, as well as at some interval at the end of treatment. In analyzing the samples, the researchers examined various immune cells and found that high-pressure oxygen therapy reversed two processes associated with disease and aging in the subjects.

First, at the end of therapy, participants had up to 37% fewer senescent cells at the end of the therapy. Senescent cells are those cells that have lost their ability to renew themselves through cell division at the end of their life cycle. They are virtually exhausted and therefore retired. While this generally has a positive background - it prevents damaged genetic material in old cells from further dividing and multiplying - too many senescent cells in the body are suspected of causing disease.

Secondly, the telomeres - the protective caps of our genetic material at the ends of the chromosomes - of the test persons were extended by up to 38 %. As already reported on many occasions, the length of the telomeres biological age, as they naturally shorten with each cell division. High-pressure oxygen therapy, however, not only stopped this shortening, but actually reversed it.

Aging process reversible?

For many years, our team has been involved in hyperbaric research and therapy treatments. Researchers around the world are trying to develop pharmacological and environmental interventions that will enable telomere lengthening. We have succeeded in this with our HBOT protocol, which proves that