Posted on 07/13/2023 6:18:27 PM PDT by ConservativeMind
Motor learning skills let us move through the world. But age or sickness can weaken our ability to learn motor tasks. Scientists studying the impact of oxygen supplementation on motor learning have found a promising treatment that could help patients who have experienced neurological trauma recover old skills.
"A simple and easy to administer treatment with 100% oxygen can drastically improve human motor learning processes," said Dr. Marc Dalecki.
Our brains need a lot of oxygen. In low-oxygen contexts cognitive function decreases, while in high-oxygen contexts it recovers, and the delivery of 100% oxygen is already used to help preserve as much of the brain as possible in patients with neurological injuries.
Motor learning is particularly dependent on oxygen-reliant information processing and memory functions: humans learn by trial and error, so the ability to remember and integrate information from previous trials is critical to efficient and effective motor learning. So could supplementing oxygen while learning a motor task help people learn faster and more effectively, offering hope for neurorehabilitation patients?
Dalecki and Wang recruited 40 participants, 20 of whom received 100% oxygen at normobaric pressure and 20 of whom received medical air (21% oxygen) through a nasal cannula during the "adaptation" or learning phase of a task.
Dalecki and Wang selected a simple visuomotor task which involved drawing lines between different targets on a digital tablet with a stylus.
"The oxygen treatment led to substantially faster and about 30% better learning in a typical visuomotor adaptation task," said Wang,m. "We also demonstrate that the participants were able to consolidate these improvements after the termination of the oxygen treatment."
The scientists found that the participants who had received oxygen learned faster and performed better, improvements which extended into later sessions of the task when oxygen was not administered.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
The authors believe this would extend to injured people, as well.
If I’m in the hospital and I need oxygen, Crank it up to 100%.
Seems to work for Sleepy Joe.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/28/white-house-says-biden-uses-cpap-machine-for-sleep-apnea
Only if you don’t like your lungs. Free radical injury and pulmonary fibrosis occurs at great than 60%
Except that prolonged 100% oxygen can dry out membranes severely.
there’s places that offer it—but a single treatment runs over $100.
I did this twice during covid lock down because I was desperate. I felt great afterwards—but the cost was too much to do with any frequency.
Too bad there is not a relatively cheap way to make this a non prescription retail product.
I believe they can add humidity to the O2 line to prevent that...?
It _definitely_ helps to run the gas over water (a humidifier), yes. But as far as I know, that still only mitigates a little of the dryness - because 100% Oxygen just dries membranes out among other things. It is the _percentage_ of oxygen that is relevant.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/question493.htm
(Is It Harmful to Breathe 100 Percent Oxygen?)
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