Oxygen Breathing as Procrit Replacement
 

When my wife was becoming anemic due to chemo (for breast cancer, not bone marrow disease) and I noticed initial research indications that Procrit/Aranesp might stimulate tumor growth, I did an enormous amount of research and discovered an experiment in an obscure journal that showed that oxygen breathing can "trick" your kidneys into ramping up their normal production of EPO (erythropoietin). We were able to use this technique to produce an Hgb response identical to that of Procrit. In fact, we started with 3 O2 breathing sessions per week but had to cut the frequency back because we got a greater 2-week increase in Hgb than is recommended when using Procrit.

I stumbled across this forum while searching for something else, and was just curious if anyone in need of elevating their Hgb had tried this technique. My wife is a private pilot, so we just brought the O2 bottle home from her airplane and used that with a cannula. The technique simply requires breathing pure oxygen for 1-2 hours a couple times per week. Just as with getting a pharmacological dose of EPO from a shot, you have to allow a couple of weeks to start seeing the increase in red blood cells. The technique assumes your kidneys can still produce EPO, but most can. In fact, I strongly suspect the recent discovery that dialysis patients treated at high altitudes need fewer blood transfusions is simply a direct result of the fact that dialysis patients treated at high altitudes are more likely to be given oxygen breathing during their visit.

The original researchers on this originally experimented with healthy young men, but have since reproduced the effect in ICU patients. I have published a paper on my wife's case, and would be happy to email the full PDF to anyone interested (the journal technically owns the copyright, or I would post it publicly). Not much else has happened over the years; there's no way to patent an oxygen bottle, so I suspect it's real hard to get any research dollars to study it. Since EPO drugs have been the largest single-drug expense for Medicare for some years, I was real disappointed I could not get even insurance company researchers interested in studying this. Oh well! :D

That sounds counter-intuitive to me. So please elaborate. My impression is that the "lack" of O2 is what stimulates the kidneys to release EPO. Is the premise that your body likes the O2 boost and when you withdraw it, the perceived lack of O2(even though it's normal) tricks the kidneys?

Unfortunately, for most with SAA, there's no shortage of EPO. Most have unusually high EPO levels.

Thanks for posting this. It pretty amazing and you are right, no one is going to try to mainstream something like this as long as profits procrit is bringing the $$$$s.

As you suppose, the intuitive explanation would be it's the difference between nitrogen washout (when the renal tissue is flooded with O2 after extended breathing) followed by the sudden drop in renal tissue O2 (when you go back to breathing just air) that make the kidneys believe they are experiencing hypoxia.

However, that's just hand-waving. If you want to follow the detailed biochemical theory of what's going on, you'll need to get a copy of Balestra's full original article. It's counter-intuitive to biologists too, which is why it's dubbed "the normobaric oxygen paradox". Part of the reason this effect was overlooked for so long was that past experiments showed that EPO output dips when you start breathing oxygen. Balestra (due to seeing EPO increased in breath-hold divers using O2) was the first to actually monitor EPO output long enough after O2 breathing to see that after it briefly dips for a few hours, it starts going up and up.

Yeah, it's really mostly just relevant for Procrit users finding themselves unable to get/afford Procrit or other ESAs, especially since they were black-labeled.

Thanks so much. This is good know.

Marlene

Hyperbaric Chamber?
 

Have ya'll read up on anything about treatment in a hyperbaric chamber? Its kind of along these lines...we have one at the hospital I work at, wonder if I could sneak in, lol