How does hyperbaric oxygen help wound healing?

Oxygen is essential for healing, and some wounds are short of it because blood is not reaching the tissue. The pressure in a hyperbaric chamber helps your blood carry more oxygen to organs and tissues, which can help some wounds heal faster.

The reasoning has three steps.

The first step is that healing needs oxygen. As a wound heals, blood vessels open in the area so blood can bring oxygen and nutrients to the wound. Oxygen is essential for healing.

The second step is that some wounds are short of it. With ischemic ulcers, narrowed arteries prevent a healthy supply of blood from flowing to the legs. That means the tissues do not get enough nutrients and oxygen, and the lack of nutrients causes cells to die. A wound that is not healing is sometimes a wound that is not being supplied.

The third step is what the chamber does about it. The air pressure inside the chamber is about two and a half times greater than the normal pressure in the atmosphere. This pressure helps your blood carry more oxygen to organs and tissues in your body. Put more simply, it helps deliver more oxygen to the wound.

Put together: healing needs oxygen, some wounds are not getting enough, and the chamber raises how much the blood can carry.

That is not a promise of an outcome. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy can help some wounds heal faster. Which wounds, and whether yours is among them, is a clinical judgment made by people who can examine it.

What to watch for

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy can help some wounds. That is a narrower claim than the one patients often arrive with. Whether this treatment would help a particular wound is a clinical judgment, not something that follows from the mechanism.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is one of several treatments a wound center may recommend depending on the wound, alongside compression stockings, ultrasound, artificial skin, negative pressure therapy, growth factor therapy and skin grafts.

Session length, the number of sessions, side effects, and who should not have the treatment are questions to ask the unit offering it.

Wound Wizard is general education and cannot assess your wound or your situation. Your own clinician is the right person to ask.

What we look at

  • Checking the blood flow in the area around the wound
  • Determining why the wound is not healing
  • Deciding whether this treatment suits the wound
  • Monitoring the wound during a course of treatment

Sources

  1. How wounds heal — MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000741.htm
  2. Wound care centers — MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000739.htm
  3. Ischemic ulcers - self-care — MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000742.htm
  4. Diabetes - foot ulcers — MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000077.htm