According to the study’s senior author, Dr. Antonello Pileggi, director of the preclinical cell processing and translational models program at the Diabetes Research Institute of the University Of Miami Miller School Of Medicine, ‘Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a relatively non-harmful way of enhancing oxygen delivery to the tissues’.
The study results were released online in May last year and published in the July print issue of Diabetes. Pileggi says that, as a team, ‘We were able to suppress the transfer of the disease (in mice) before the onset of the disease. After diabetes had occurred, the efficacy [of hyperbaric therapy] was much less’ but combining hyperbaric therapy with medications could possibly enhance the effectiveness of both treatments.
For the study, two types of mice were used. One type spontenously develops diabetes, which isn’t exactly the same as type 1 diabetes in humans, but ‘it’s a good surrogate of type 1,’ says Pileggi. Researchers induced diabetes into the second type of mice, and found that the treatment reduced this group’s diabetes risk by 40%. For the group that spontaneously develop diabetes, hyperbaric therapy reduced the risk of developing diabetes by 20%, and both groups’ onset or progression of the disease was delayed thanks to the treatment with hyperbaric therapy.
When it comes to how hyperbaric therapy manages to do this, the researchers are still unsure, but Pileggi says that it’s clear nonetheless that the therapy has positive effects on the immune system. According to Pileggi, the therapy caused a significant increase in creation of new beta cells, which is an ideal situation, ‘But, it’s not a silver bullet for diabetes. It could be an adjuvant to other therapies’. He concluded by saying that application to humans is, unfortunately, still years away.