Equipment For Home Oxygen Therapy
You can receive oxygen in several ways. Here are two of the most popular options for at-home use:
Tips For Living With Copd
COPD has no cure, and you cant reverse the damage it does to your lungs and airways. Once the disease has progressed, you must begin treatment to reduce the damage and slow further progression.
Fatigue will require you to use the energy you have wisely. Take extra care to not push yourself too hard.
COPD symptoms can occasionally flare up, and there may be times when symptoms and complications are worse. During these episodes, or exacerbations, your doctor will recommend treatments and medications to ease your symptoms.
If you have COPD-related fatigue, try these five tips to help manage your symptoms.
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Who Can Benefit From Home Oxygen Therapy
Home oxygen therapy can be useful for people who do not have enough oxygen in their blood.
It can help with conditions such as:
- breathing problems caused by a combination of being obese and having an underlying condition
Home oxygen therapy can help with symptoms such as:
- breathlessness
- feeling tired all the time
- memory problems
- coughing
Copd Fatigue And How To Avoid Being Tired
For those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease , it can be difficult to get oxygen in your lungs to breathe.
They can become easily fatigued when the body is having to work hard just to get enough oxygen to help organs function.
COPD causes a reduction of airflow into your lungs, this can make it hard to breathe and reduce the amount of oxygen each breathe can take in.
As a progressive disease, COPD can cause symptoms to worsen over time, which can cause more work to get the same amount of oxygen into the body.
The constant effort of trying to get oxygen into the body can tire you from living your life.
Your lifestyle, health and body can all take a toll with COPD, as it exhausts you, making it harder for you to go about your everyday life.
It is important to stay active with COPD, but it can be hard when you are dealing with fatigue.
We found a few ways to help battle your fatigue and keep you awake and active during the day.
Symptoms of COPD:
In order to fight the feeling of fatigue, you need to better understand the symptoms of COPD.
Many symptoms of COPD are common among many diseases and illnesses, so it can be hard to attribute them to COPD.
Common symptoms include a chronic cough, excess mucus buildup in the lungs and throat, fatigue, shortness of breath, tightness in the chest, wheezing and possible weight loss.
Chronic cough and excess mucus can be believed to come from a cold or flu, not necessarily COPD.
Fatigue:
COPD & Fatigue:
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The Potential Dangers Of Using Supplemental Oxygen
Before we discuss how to use oxygen safely, it’s important to understand the potential risks. If you know what to look out for, you’re less likely to make a dangerous mistake.
The main immediate danger that supplemental oxygen poses is its flammability. When oxygen leaks out into the air from your tank, nasal cannula, or mask, it can raise oxygen levels in the room or in your immediate area, which significantly increases the flammability of everything nearby.
A certain amount of leakage from your nose and nasal cannula is inevitable, meaning there is a constant flammability risk when you use your supplemental oxygen. That’s why you have to take a variety of fire-safe precautions any time oxygen is in use, even if your oxygen tank isn’t nearby.
It is also important to make sure that all the oxygen from the tank goes straight into your lungs through your mask or nasal cannula instead of leaking into the air. Leaky tanks, faulty valves, and carelessness when opening and closing the valve can make the surrounding air extremely flammable, putting you, your belongings, and others nearby at risk.
Standard oxygen tanks, the most common type of equipment used to provide supplemental oxygen, pose hazards of their own, as well. The oxygen must be highly pressurized when it’s stored in the tank, which means oxygen tanks can explode violently or take off like a rocket if the container is somehow damaged and ruptured.
The Sympathetic Nervous System And Fibromyalgia Again
Several researchers believe that ischemia induced pain plays a key role in the reduced activity and deconditioning sometimes found in FM. Elvin concluded that muscle ischemia induced pain played a key role in FM patients activity limitations. He felt that the reduced muscle blood flows following exercise that he found in FM could be explained by deconditioning, sympathetic nervous system issues and/or ischemia induced pain.
Kulshreshtha proposed that an overactive sympathetic nervous system caused a vasoconstriction of the blood vessels. The narrowed blood vessels produced a low oxygen state which caused pain. The Lights proposed that a similar vasoconstriction of the body causing the buildup of metabolites and inflammatory agents. The Lights finding of a huge buildup of muscle injury sensing receptors in ME/CFS/FM could conceivably be caused by need to constantly monitor the muscles for signs of reperfusion induced injury.
Another study found that increased vasodilation of the blood is associated with decreased pain in FM pointed.
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When Should I Talk To My Doctor About Home Oxygen
When a person isnt getting enough oxygen, their brain, heart, kidneys, and other essential organs can be affected. If youre experiencing any of the following symptoms, talk to your doctor to see if youre acandidate for home oxygen therapy:
- Shortness of breath
- Waking up suddenly with shortness of breath or a feeling of choking
- Persistent cough
Fundamental Processes Possibly Hit
The authors hypothesized that high levels of oxidative stress may be interfering with basic enzymatic processes involving coenzymes such as NAD+/NADH, FAD+/FADH and others.
Pointing to evidence of these problems from their past work, they asserted that, dehydrogenase, transferase, and oxidase deficiencies are prevalent and that a, general imbalance i.e. a redox or oxidative stress issue is affecting basic enzymatic processes in ME/CFS.
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Best Continuous Flow: Philips Respironics Simplygo Portable Oxygen Concentrator
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Noisy
The Respironics SimplyGo has a continuous flow of up to 54 minutes. It also comes with two rechargeable batteries, so you can always have a charge going while your POC is in use.
At 10 lbs and with a modern design of less than 12 inches wide and tall, it is one of the smallest POCs with continuous flow. Its approved for use up to 10,000 feet, where its able to keep up a pulse dose setting of one to six and a continuous flow setting between 0.5 and two.
Weight: 10 lbs | Delivery/Flow Type: Pulse and continuous flow | Battery Life: 3.5 hours
What Are The Implications
Because the trial was underpowered, interpretation is difficult. The results provide no evidence that long-term home oxygen therapy improves quality of life for people with severe chronic heart failure. However the authors acknowledge that it is not possible to distinguish whether the lack of a detected effect is a result of the trial being underpowered or whether there is a true lack of effect. The low adherence may also have reduced the impact of therapy.
Oxygen therapy can be burdensome. It limits mobility, it can cause soreness around the nose and the equipment is noisy. The concentrator has to be fitted to the home, usually requiring some drilling through walls. The machine uses electricity, the costs of which are normally met by the NHS. Home oxygen therapy is therefore expensive to the health service and burdensome to the patient, and the results of this trial, while preliminary in nature, suggest that it is not money well spent as a treatment for heart failure. It is possible that emergency use of oxygen, from an oxygen bottle, could still be of use for severe episodes of breathlessness and might reduce hospital admissions. The authors suggest that this could be studied further.
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How This Proteome Analysis Compares To Other Me/cfs Proteome Analyses And Mitochondrial Dysfunction
Proteomic studies, although not by SWATH-MS analysis, in more recent years have implicated mitochondrial involvement in ME/CFS, but with conflicting evidence. One group found reduced mitochondria biogenesis, but not normalized respiratory chain enzyme activities in the muscle of ME/CFS sufferers . Consistent with this study, the elevated expression of mitochondrial proteins in serum, platelets and lymphocytes have been found in some studies . Conversely in others, mitochondrial function appeared reduced in isolated neutrophil cells, , as did respiration in ME/CFS PBMCs , while oxidative phosphorylation complexes appeared unaffected .
The key role of mitochondrial Complex I
Portable Oxygen Concentrator For Travel Use
5.00
- With portable handle design so you can take it anywhere with you
- For home, travel and car use patients with breathing difficulties
- Improves blood circulation lessens chronic fatigue syndrome and speeds up the bodys recovery
- Size: 10.2 x 7.7 x 15.2 or 26 x 19.5 x 38.7 cm / Weight: 12 lbs or 5.4kg / Power Consumption: 90W
- AC Power Input: 100 to 240 VAC, 50/60 Hz, 1.8 A max / AC Power Output: 14.8 VDC, 8 A max
- DC Power Input: Input 11. to 16.8 VDC 20 A max / DC Power Output: 14.8 VDC, 8 A max / Battery: Lithium Ion 14.8 VDC / Battery Charging Duration: 4 to 5hrs / Variants: 1 Set with Oximeter or 1 Set without Oximeter
- Package contents:1 x Portable Oxygen Concentrator For Travel Use1 x Lithium-Ion battery1 x AC power supply and DC cord1 x Headstyle oxygen pipe1 x Earphone oxygen pipe1 x Bacteria Filter
$1,124.00$1,260.00
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What Is Hbot Used For
The following are off-label uses for mild HBOT
Anxiety, Arthritis, Autism, Alzheimers Disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Depression, Diabetes, Fibromyalgia, Insomnia, Recovery from surgery, Soft-tissue and ligament repair, Stroke, Traumatic Brain Injury, mold, PTSD. A range of other conditions can be researched by .
Best Small: Airsep Airsep Freestyle 3 Portable Concentrator
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No smart features
The AirSep Freestyle 3 weighs only five pounds and is very small, as in mix-it-up-with-your-smartphone small. AirSep is leading the category in compact oxygen concentrators with this model.
This specific model is designed for the active user with a quiet, efficient pulse flow that goes up to a setting of three. It has a Max Pulse Setting of three and has a max oxygen of 332 per minute. The Freestyle can be worn over your shoulder with a carrying bag or you can add on the optional harness to convert into a backpack, which frees you to do your favorite activity.
Weight: 4.9 lbs | Delivery/Flow Type: Pulse flow | Battery Life: 3.5 hours
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Noisy
If energy efficiency is priority number one, you can do no wrong with the SeQual Eclipse 5 mobile unit. Its hands down one of the most energy-efficient models with long-lasting batteries available.
The battery lasts up to five hours and has a pulse dose of one to six liters of oxygen delivered per minute for precise and predictable 90% oxygen with each inhale. SeQual’s AutoSAT technology really sets it apart. It helps maintain the same amount of oxygen consistently, even as the breath rate varies.
But its also on the heavier side. It weighs 18 pounds and comes with a cart that easily wheels it around. You can also sling it over both shoulders and carry it as a backpack.
Weight: 18.4 lbs | Delivery/Flow Type: Pulse and continuous flow | Battery Life: Five hours
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Reduced Blood And Oxygen Flows A Critical Element In Fm And Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
More FM studies than not have found reduced blood flows to the muscle and several ME/CFS studies have as well. These researchers didnt find reduced blood flows but they did find reduced oxygen uptake which suggested the cells were in an ischemic state and that could be the key to the whole shebang.
Ischemia occurs when blood flows to a tissue are low enough to reduce the levels of oxygen and glucose needed for cellular energy production. The problem is actually not the ischemia per se but what comes after it in what must be one of natures weirdest tricks, re-infusing tissues that have been deprived of oxygen with oxygen again can cause a serious problem called reperfusion injury.
Reperfusion injury can cause high levels of membrane damaging free radicals
It turns out that the absence of oxygen which means the switching on of anaerobic metabolism and the production of toxic-by products creates an environment packed for inflammation.
Oxygen is a mild free radical and throwing it back into an oxygen deprived environment can result in an explosion of stronger free radicals such a nitric oxide, superoxide and finally peroxynitrite . Bizarrely, as thats going on white blood cells may also bind to the endothelial cells lining the small blood capillaries, once again blocking the flow of the blood.
Using Home Oxygen Therapy
The main ways of using home oxygen therapy are through:
- short tubes placed in your nostrils this is called a nasal cannula
- a mask over your nose and mouth
Some people may need a tube inserted into an opening made in the front of their neck or a tube placed in their mouth and down their windpipe.
There are 3 types of devices that can be used to give you oxygen:
- an oxygen concentrator
An engineer will install the equipment and explain how to use it safely.
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What Tests Will My Doctor Perform
When you visit your doctor, there are two primary tests theyll likely want to perform: pulse-oximetry tests and arterial blood gas tests.
Pulse-oximetry testing provides a simple means for your doctor or pulmonary specialist to monitor your saturation levels in various situations, such as while exercising, moving around your home, sleeping, or while idle.
Arterial blood gas tests provide a very precise snapshot of your blood saturation.
However, it requires drawing blood and lab analysis, so its not as flexible for diagnosing some conditions and cant provide a dynamic look at your saturation levels throughout the day.
Once your doctor has data to confirm their diagnosis, they can create an ideal oxygen therapy plan to address your needs and give you a prescription to get your oxygen concentrator.
Qualifying for oxygen therapy can vary based on your region, but typically supplemental oxygen is considered necessary when arterial blood oxygen levels remain at 60 mmHg or lower than 90 percent saturation when measured using a pulse oximeter.
Do You Offer At Home Rentals
Hood River Hyperbaric will soon be offering uses the most trusted, reliable brands.
HBOT is a noninvasive therapy that is the most trusted way to increase oxygen levels to all organs of the body.
The typical treatment lasts for 60-90 minutes, during which the patient lies down and breathes normally.
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What Did This Study Do
This was a randomised controlled trial of long-term home oxygen therapy versus standard care of 114 patients with severe chronic heart failure. Patients were on average 70 years of age and 70% were men. All of them had severe symptoms of breathlessness either at rest or after minimal exertion. Patients were excluded if they had hypoxia, low oxygen levels in the blood.
Oxygen therapy was delivered in the patients homes via a machine called an oxygen concentrator. Oxygen was prescribed for 15 hours per day, similar to standard practice for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The oxygen concentrator delivered air with about 28% oxygen, up from the 20.9% found in normal room air. All participants received standard medical therapy.
The original target was 222 patients but the trial was stopped because of poor patient adherence to the prescribed therapy. The trial was therefore underpowered and so the results need to be treated with caution.
