Divers’ oxygen therapy that could help treat long Covid

THE long tail of Covid was graphically highlighted by new figures showing that just 29 per cent of those who’d been hospitalised with it were fully recovered a year later.

At the moment treatment for those with long Covid is limited because we still don’t know what’s going on.

Some think it’s owing to damage caused by blood clots, others believe the villain is long-term inflammation.

These claims are being tested in a trial at Cambridge University looking at potential preventative treatments for long Covid. Recently discharged patients will be offered apixaban (a blood thinner), atorvastatin (a statin), or usual care (i.e. standard care appropriate to their symptoms). The statin has been included because, as well as being cholesterol-lowering, it has anti-inflammatory effects.

Separately, one of the more unusual therapies being explored is using a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. These are usually used to treat deep sea divers with ‘the bends’, but also patients with wounds that won’t heal.

Last week I met Dr Michael Gonevski, a hyperbaric and diving specialist, who is leading research in the UK into the use of such chambers for long Covid. He thinks the extreme fatigue some suffer is because Covid has damaged their mitochondria, the powerhouses inside our cells that turn food into energy: the theory is that hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) helps re-boot the mitochondria.

So far, he and colleagues have treated more than 120 patients, with good results.

‘We’ve had people who had not been able to leave their homes for over a year, who showed radical improvement in days,’ Dr Gonevski told me. He and researchers from University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, recently published a small study showing that ten sessions of HBOT carried out over 12 days can reduce fatigue and improve verbal ability and information processing speed.

One patient, Catherine Finnis, a 39-yearold teacher and mother of two, used to run half marathons until getting Covid two years ago. She’d been left unable to exercise and constantly coughing, fatigued and mentally ‘very slow’, she told me.

After three sessions she noticed improvements and was able to go back to work. She’s not yet returned to her old self, ‘but I feel better every day’. HBOT is not yet available on the NHS and Dr Gonevski is keen to get funding for larger trials. With so many people affected, there’s clearly an urgent need to find effective treatments, so fingers crossed.