Title : Oxygen-ozone therapy and cognitive frailty: A non-pharmacological approach to potentially resolve immune and inflammatory dysfunctions
Abstract:
As the world’s population ages, Cognitive Frailty (CF) is becoming one of the most serious health problems and elucidating its biological mechanisms along with prevention and treatments becomes increasingly important also considering the associated health costs. We thus performed a clinical randomized trial where CF subjects received a non-pharmacological therapy based on the regenerative properties of ozone (O3) known to act on immune/inflammation processes, strongly altered in CF.
A cohort of 75 patients was stratified in non-, mildly- or severely frail rate and treated with placebo, oxygen (O2) or O2-O3. The serum levels of 27 peculiar pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines and chemokine cell signalling molecules were measured by using the Bio-Plex Pro Human Cytokine 27-plex immunoassay. The student’s t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Tukey’s post hoc test were used for comparison of means between the groups.
Preliminary analyses evidenced the implication, at different levels, of some molecules in relation to the frailty rate. Noteworthy, we observed modulations of immune (i.e interleukin, IL-9) and inflammation (i.e IL-1β) biomarkers at baseline and after treatment. Correlations between clinical CF profiles and peripheral levels of the considered biomarkers are ongoing in order to predict the response to O2-O3 therapy.
Although preliminary, these results confirm that the immune-inflammation systems are involved in the aetiopathogenetic mechanisms of CF, and that the related molecules could be potential therapeutic targets/biomarkers for the O2-O3 therapy. These data will further permit to validate a potential new non-pharmacological treatment approach for this condition.
