Pure Oxygen Speeds Up Learning. Can It Help Stroke Survivors Recover?

As a physical therapist in Shanghai, Zheng Wang worked with people recovering from strokes after their brains had been damaged by oxygen deprivation. They usually followed a predictable recovery pattern, making lots of progress over the first few visits, then hitting a wall. Patients asked when they’d finally feel normal, and Wang told them that they’d get better with time. “But actually,” he remembers, “I knew from the bottom of my heart that they wouldn’t improve much, no matter how hard we tried.”

Meanwhile, halfway across the world, Marc Dalecki, then an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology at Louisiana State University (LSU), couldn’t stop thinking about oxygen. Dalecki spent much of his early career studying scuba diving and remembers divers using nasal cannulas of O2 to help with everything from hypoxia to headaches. He always wondered whether this simple treatment could help neurological patients in rehab. “I promised myself that I would study it when I got my own research lab,” he says.

For its relatively small size, the brain consumes a…