Toddler’s story highlights therapy
DEAR DOCTOR: How did oxygen therapy help the brain of that toddler who almost drowned a few years ago? Has the child completely recovered from her near-death experience?
DEAR READER: In Arkansas in 2016, a 23-month-old girl who had just learned to walk slipped through a latched baby gate in her home and fell into a backyard swimming pool. When her family found her, she wasn’t breathing.
Despite nonstop CPR administered first by her mother and then by paramedics, it would be more than 90 minutes before the child’s heart began to beat on its own. At the hospital, MRI scans revealed extensive brain damage. When she returned home five weeks later, her profound brain injury was clearly apparent. The child had no motor control. She was unable to sit up or speak and had to take all nourishment through a feeding tube. Due to the brain injury, the toddler’s body sometimes would “forget” to breathe while she was asleep. Alerted by a monitor, her parents would rush to resuscitate her.
Research into brain injuries and their treatment led the family to an expert in hyperbaric
medicine at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is perhaps best known as the treatment used for decompression sickness, a complication that occurs when scuba divers resurface too quickly. It is also used to treat serious infections and wounds that won’t heal.
In this type of therapy, the patient is provided with a higher percentage of oxygen than is available in the air we breathe.
The child’s treatment led to remarkable results. She went from being profoundly injured to what her parents now say is a normal 3-year-old. Brain scans taken five months after the near-drowning reveal only mild injury to the brain. The shrinkage that accompanies serious brain injuries also was reversed.
It’s not known exactly how hyperbaric oxygen therapy heals tissues at the cellular level. In this particular case, there is some speculation by researchers that the child’s age, at which tissues are already rapidly growing, played a role in her recovery.