A Promising Treatment For Trauma-Induced Fibromyalgia

A treatment that uses high-pressure chambers filled with 100 percent oxygen can significantly improve chronic pain caused by fibromyalgia. 

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), where patients lie in glass chambers and breathe in pure oxygen, is already used to treat wounds that won’t heal, carbon monoxide poisoning, and other medical conditions. 

Researchers at Tel Aviv University wanted to see if it could be a more effective treatment than the medication that is currently prescribed to patients suffering from fibromyalgia – a disorder where the patient feels constant and widespread pain without any real damage to the body.

They recruited 64 Israelis aged 18 and up who suffered from fibromyalgia as a result of a head injury, and split them into two groups: one received conventional medical treatment, and the other received HBOT at medical centers.

Forty percent of the participants who received HBOT for five days a week, for three months, experienced such an improvement that they no longer met the criteria for fibromyalgia. This did not happen to any patient in the drug treatment group.

Additionally, the patients that underwent HBOT all reported that their quality of life had improved significantly. 

“As a whole, existing treatments are not good enough [for fibromyalgia],” said Prof. Jacob Ablin, MD, from the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center.

“It is a chronic disease that significantly affects the quality of life, including young people, and hyperbaric medicine meets an acute need of these patients.

“Of course, these are preliminary studies, and we must follow and see what effect the medical protocol has on the patients after one, two and three years – and if it is necessary to maintain the positive results with further exposure to hyperbaric sessions.”

Prof. Shai Efrati, MD, who led the study, said: “In the group that received hyperbaric treatment, you could see the repair of the brain tissue, while in the control group there was only an attempt to relieve the pain – without treating the damaged tissue – and of course the medication group experienced the side effects associated with drug treatment.

“This is a difference in approach: to cure instead of just treating the symptoms. We assessed the improvement of the participants in the hyperbaric group more than a week after the last hyperbaric session.

“More follow-up studies are needed to see the duration of the beneficial effect of the treatment and if and for whom additional treatment will be needed.

“Our goal as doctors is not only to treat the symptoms but to treat as much as possible the source of the problem, thus improving the quality of life of fibromyalgia patients.”

The results of the study were published in the journal PLOS One.

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