A promising new treatment for PTSD

Idit Negrin would try anything to overcome the trauma that has haunted her since she attended the Nova Music Festival on October 7. when Hamas massacred hundreds of civiliansS. “We saw the terrorists and they started shooting at us,” she said. She ran for her life.

Afterwards: “I woke up every night, every night around three o’clock, screaming, sweating and shaking. I think after a day, or two days after that, I felt like I was falling and crying.”

We met her this summer when she had completed two-thirds of her 60-session hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) course. It is a treatment that has long been used to combat compression sickness in divers and wounds that refuse to heal. But at the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research in Be’er Ya’akov, Israel, they are now also treating a completely different disease: post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

Negrin described her experiences with PTSD: “You feel like you’re going crazy. I’m calling people and yelling, ‘There’s another terrorist attack!’ And then you understand that you have no control over your brain.”

Negrin is trying to regain that control, along with approximately 650 other October 7 survivors who suffer from PTSD and are being treated for free, along with military veterans at the Sagol Center – currently the largest hyperbaric center in the world.

Dr. Shai Efrati runs this clinic, where they treat up to 350 patients a day, and is at the forefront of this type of medicine. “What we’re doing is basically tricking the body,” Efrati said. “Hypoxia, lack of oxygen, is the most powerful trigger to induce the entire cascade of the repair mechanism.”

Efrati says they induce repair mechanisms in the body and brain in these pressurized chambers, where it feels like you are diving up to 30 feet. Patients breathe in pure oxygen, which the body can absorb up to 16 times normal levels under such high-pressure conditions. The masks are then removed at five-minute intervals.

Efrati said: “The drop from very high to normal is interpreted at the same level as hypoxia, as a lack of oxygen. That causes the body to activate the stem cells, and for the first time even in humans we can see generation of new neurons, generation of new blood vessels in the brain and this is amazing.”

The treatment has been described as “not approved” and “not proven”. “When we talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, this is what it should look like,” Efrati said.

“Are you saying there are a lot of fraudsters out there?” Doane asked.

‘Indeed. And this is not only not good, it can even be dangerous.”

Dr. Efrati is constantly experimenting with new ways to use this treatment. At his clinic near Tel Aviv we could see how they offer hyperbaric drugs to athletes (“If we can shorten the recovery period, you can push harder by doing the exercises”), and how they help patients with brain injuries get moving again through the growth of new neurons and blood vessels in the brain.

“It’s not like we’re improving his running,” Efrati said of an athlete’s performance. “We are repairing the brain.”

They have published several studies on PTSD in veterans. One study today found that 68% of patients showed significant improvement. Another reported that PTSD remission lasted at least two years, which is longer than other established treatments. “We want to assess everything objectively,” Efrati said.

It’s convincing enough for the Israeli military, or IDF, to ask Efrati’s team to stop testing and start treating. The doctor says you can always ask for more data: “You can see the evidence in front of you.”

Shachar Mizrhai was among the IDF veterans referred for the first clinical trial in 2018. He was a soldier during an Israeli offensive in Gaza in 2014 and was in an armored vehicle when it was ambushed. In the short term, he was thinking about survival; the suffering came later. “I can’t sleep at night,” he said. “The moment I said it [on] the uniform, I feel like I want to die. I smell blood. I smell war.”

He had tried medication, therapy and sleeping pills. He contemplated suicide. “Nothing really helped to come back to life,” he said. “And I heard this could be help, and maybe this is my last chance before I end my life.”

Dr. Keren Doenyas-Barak, head of the PTSD program at the Sagol Center, followed Mizrhai through his 60 sessions and showed us his brain scans from June 2018 and March 2019, highlighting the activation of areas used to express emotions or processes effectively to regulate. information. The later brain scan images lit up; that did not happen before the treatment.

“Many people tend to view PTSD as a psychological phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” says Doenyas-Barak. “So we treat PTSD very similarly to other brain disorders.”

For Mizrhai, the treatment changed everything:” “It’s the first time I felt again. I started sleeping at night, I was less afraid. It makes me feel alive again. … I was a dying man, and hereafter I am a living man.”

Republican Congressman and physician Greg Murphy of North Carolina said, “If it’s offered in Israel and they’re getting such good results, why the hell aren’t we offering it in the United States?”

That’s a question Murphy — a member of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs — is raising in the halls of Congress. One in 10 of his voters is a veteran. “I love our VA,” he said. “But we’re not reaching a certain segment of our veterans if 22 people commit suicide every day. And if we do something and there is a treatment that has shown definitive results, then I think it would be medical malpractice not to offer it. that to our veterans.”

In 2023, he introduced the Veterans’ National Traumatic Injury Treatment Act. “We really just want the VA to do a pilot study within their own borders to see if they show that hyperbaric oxygen works or not,” he said.

And what does he hear from the VA? “They just don’t want to do anything; it’s just their hands up,” he said. “The reasons we’ve heard are, ‘Well, the results are mixed.’ Good. Look at the results over the last 15 years. Look at the studies in Israel. We see an absolute effect in these and other conditions, for Parkinson’s, migraines, some even MS, and neurological disorders.”

“Sunday Morning” requested an interview with the Department of Veterans Affairs, but they declined to comment.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, we met Dr. Lin Weaver, chief of hyperbaric medicine at Intermountain Health. They treat about 20 patients per day, which puts into perspective the enormous numbers – 350 per day – treated in Israel. He says they rarely use their hyperbaric chambers for PTSD patients because it’s expensive, but he’s seen positive results: “I’ve had patients that I’ve treated. Everyone has surprisingly gotten better,” Weaver said.

But insurance companies say there isn’t enough evidence that it works for PTSD. And in the US, out-of-pocket costs top $50,000.

“What’s needed is like a drug trial,” Weaver said. “But it takes years to conduct these trials. It all depends on the question: ‘Is there an initiative? And is there a funding source?'”

Doane asked, “But if doctors like you believe so strongly that this works, why isn’t there enough pressure from people like you to say, ‘Prove this’?”

“Well, believe me, we tried,” Weaver replied. “I have submitted proposals to extramural funding agencies. So far they have not accepted them.”

Doane asked Dr. Efrati, “You are on the frontier of medicine here. Is there a danger in that?’

“As a scientist, I will always tell you that I need more research, I need more data,” he replied. “But as a doctor, when I sit in front of you and look at your eyes, now you have a problem. This is our job as doctors.”

Idit Negrin says this treatment gives her hope that she can move past that Nova Music Festival nightmare. She hopes that with the therapy she can move on with her life.

But she wears a reminder – a Nova necklace – while she receives treatment. “I can’t get her off my neck,” she said.

Her progress is motivation for Dr. Efrati to continue to innovate and think about the future, so that his patients can process the past.

Doane said, “Some people will listen to this and say it sounds too good to be true.”

“Yes, I know,” Negrin said. “But it’s a fact.”

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Story produced by Sari Aviv. Editor: Ed Givnish.

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