Shropshire Star

Doctors reverse brain damage in two-year-old girl after drowning accident

Eden Carlson’s heart stopped beating for nearly two hours when she went into cardiac arrest after falling into the family pool.

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Eden Carlson.

Doctors in the US who successfully reversed brain damage in a two-year-old child caused by drowning say early treatment and oxygen therapy helped to save her life.

Scientists from Louisiana State University and the University of North Dakota were able to almost completely reverse total brain damage – 162 days after Eden Carlson went into cardiac arrest after falling into the family pool in February 2016.

“We were early in the entry process,” said Dr Paul Harch, of Louisiana State University.

“The startling regrowth of tissue in this case occurred because we were able to intervene early in a growing child, before long-term tissue degeneration.”

She was also constantly squirming and shaking her head after she was discharged.

An MRI scan of her brain revealed that the accident had caused deep grey matter injury and cerebral atrophy, with both grey and white matter loss.

Using a treatment known as hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) – which is often used to treat carbon monoxide poisoning or decompression sickness in divers – Dr Harch and his team were able to reverse the brain damage after 39 sessions.

Eden Carlson.
Eden was able to discontinue her medication following treatment (Eden Carlson Miracles/LSU/YouTube screenshot)

As Eden wasn’t located close enough to an HBOT chamber, the therapy happened in two stages.

The first stage began 55 days after the accident with short-duration treatments – where Eden was administered normobaric oxygen (oxygen at sea level) twice a day through a nasal tube for 45 minutes.

The little girl showed marked improvements in alertness and was able to laugh, move her arms and grasp with her left hand. She also regained part of her ability to eat orally.

“Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is the use of increased pressure and increased oxygen to treat wounds in the body in any location and of any duration,” explained Dr Harch.

“One of the main mechanisms of action is gene expression. Every time a person goes in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, up to 8,101 genes in every cell in our body are temporarily turned on or turned off.

“The largest clusters of genes that are turned on are those that code for growth and repair hormones, i.e. heal wounds, and the largest clusters that are turned off are pro-inflammatory genes and those that code for cell death.

Hyperbaric chamber.
A hyperbaric oxygen chamber (OpenStax College/Wikimedia Commons)

While videos documented in Eden’s case suggest the therapy has shown positive results, HBOT remains a controversial therapy in the US and is yet to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

So far, 13 uses of a hyperbaric chamber for HBOT have been cleared by FDA, which include “treatment of air or gas embolism (dangerous ‘bubbles’ in the bloodstream that obstruct circulation), carbon monoxide poisoning, decompression sickness (often known by divers as ‘the bends’) and thermal burns (caused by heat or fire)”.

The results are published in Medical Gas Research.

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