KFYR-TV - Many American soldiers who make it home from Iraq or Afghanistan come back injured. They suffer from lost limbs, bullet wounds, but more commonly from brain injuries. They`re caused by IED`s, and their disabling affects have become the top injury among troops.
But a Bismarck doctor says there is hope for these young men and women.
When National Guard soldier Tim Wicks returned from Afghanistan three years ago he was anything but okay. Pressure from an IED blast not only broke many of his bones, it also tore him up internally, and caused what the military calls a Blast Induced Traumatic Brain Injury.
"I knew who people were around me," says Wicks. "I really wasn`t sure who I was, where I was, how I got there, where I was before there. It took a while for all that to come back."
Fortunately for Wicks, his cognitive function did come back. But that`s not the case for all of the estimated 10 to 20 percent of soldiers who suffer traumatic brain injuries.
That`s where Radiologist Dr. Ted Fogarty of Bismarck comes in. He and a group of researchers at Louisiana State University are conducting an investigational pilot study to prove that brains injured by concussive blasts can heal themselves with the help of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Fogarty says the therapy works because the high pressure of a hyperbaric chamber forces oxygen into areas of the brain that, due to swelling, have been starved for oxygen since the injury happened. He gained even more confidence in the therapy, after seeing what it did for car crash victim Curt Allen, who went from highly disabled to high functioning after 90 session in a hyperbaric chamber.
"Seeing this natural history of this kind of brain trauma thrown on its head by Dr. Harch in this video and this kid`s experience, I said, `That`s never been seen in medicine,`" says Fogarty. "You don`t have kids and you don`t have people who have been through brain trauma go through therapy and get darn near close to normal."
But Fogarty says hyperbarics are now changing that. The study he and LSU researchers are working on together is about half completed. So far, they say the soldiers they`ve examined have made marked improvements in their cognitive abilities.
Fogarty and his co-researchers hope to produce enough evidence supporting hyperbaric therapy for the treatment of traumatic brain injuries caused by blasts so that more government funds will be granted for continued research on the subject.
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