Family Credits Fish
Oil With Healing
Son’s Brain......It was mild
curiosity that drew John Virgin and his son Bryce to
the flashing lights and commotion of an accident
scene near their home. In the back of John’s mind was his older son, Grant,
who had gone for a walk nearby minutes earlier. He gestured to an emergency medical technician to
ask what happened. “I called him over and I said, ‘My son was walking
over this way,’ and he said, ‘Describe him,’” said
John. “I said, ‘Well, he’s 6 feet tall and has hair
color just like mine,’ and then he pointed at Bryce
and said, ‘…and looks just like him.’” John looked down at the area that had been
cordoned-off — the pavement covered with blood —
and his heart sank. “At that point you realize your worst fear,” he said. “I
knew it was grave.” Minutes earlier, the 16-year-old had been airlifted to
a nearby trauma center after being struck by a hit-
and-run driver. He had a long list of injuries: a torn
aorta, a traumatic brain injury — including skull
fractures and bleeding throughout his brain —
compound bone fractures and spinal fractures. Seemingly endless bits of broken glass and gravel
were embedded in his skin. John and Bryce Virgin rushed home to break the
news to Grant’s mother, JJ. Then the family hurried
to the hospital, hoping to find him still alive. When they arrived, they were met by grim-faced
doctors who offered the slimmest odds that Grant
Virgin would live through the night. Instead of shrugging their shoulders in acceptance,
his parents were indignant. “It’s like, how dare you not fight for my son’s life?”
said JJ Virgin. “It really took us … getting very
aggressive and assertive to save our son’s life,
because they weren’t going to do it. “They told us not to. They told us to let him go.” From that moment forward — time and time again
— they would go against doctor’s orders. That
included trying unconventional, untested therapies
— anything that might help Grant. One in particular
involved giving him high doses of omega-3 fatty
acids (found in fish oil). Fish oil is what the Virgin family believes ultimately
— dramatically — altered his life course, and healed
his brain. Weeks before fish oil was even considered, Grant
Virgin underwent multiple surgeries, and spent
considerable time on a ventilator. Eventually, his body was stable, but his brain was
still riddled with damage. He was in a coma, and his
doctors urged his family to “wait and see” while his
brain healed. “The doctor told me, ‘OK, now we wait.’ and I go,
‘We wait?’ ‘Yes, we wait,’” said JJ Virgin, who
questioned that course of action — “‘Surely there’s
something we can do?’” The doctor’s response, according to her: “‘Nope,
there’s nothing we can do. We just wait. The brain’s
got its own time schedule.’” Around the same time, she was receiving a flurry of
advice from friends. One suggested trying
progesterone to heal her son’s brain. In early studies, progesterone has been associated
with reduced inflammation in the brain and improved
neurological outcomes after traumatic brain injury.
But the data in this area, although promising, are
very early. Despite that, beginning about two weeks after the
accident, his mother and father began intermittently
rubbing a cream containing progesterone on him. (A
leading expert questioned the efficacy of
administering progesterone in this way, noting that
in studies, it is administered intravenously.) His family says very soon afterward, Grant Virgin
emerged from his coma, and began to speak. It was mostly a few words and phrases — “Let’s go”
or “I love you” — uttered in endless cycles, but his
family was heartened by his progress. “When your kid is in a coma, and then coming out of
a coma, you watch every nuance,” said JJ Virgin. “If
his eyelash fluttered, ‘Oh, his eyelash fluttered!’ “You’re holding on to anything that you can see and
monitoring everything, every single day. And so it
was very clear when the acceleration happened.
Really clear.” Another, more dramatic, acceleration occurred
several weeks later — about nine weeks after the
accident. JJ Virgin got more advice, this time from friends
who had seen a CNN report about high-dose fish oil
used in cases of severe traumatic brain injury. Fish oil, they thought, might heal Grant Virgin’s
brain. “If someone said to me, you know what, you can
give him fish oil, you can give him better nutrition,
you’ll get maybe 5% (improvement), I’ll take that,”
she said. She got in touch with one of the foremost omega-3
experts, Dr. Barry Sears, who had consulted on the
first-ever case of high-dose fish oil for traumatic
brain injury in 2006. It involved a miner, Randal McCloy, who was
involved in a deadly explosion in West Virginia. His
brain had been badly damaged by carbon monoxide,
and his team of doctors was trying desperately to
keep him alive. McCloy’s neurosurgeon at the time, Dr. Julian
Bailes, describes considering high-dose fish oil in
this case, as akin to “throw(ing) the kitchen sink at
him.” “There is no known solution, there’s no known drug,
there’s nothing that we have really to offer these
sorts of patients,” said Bailes, co-director of
NorthShore Neurological Institute in Evanston,
Illinois, during a previous interview with CNN. The theory behind fish oil as a therapeutic
intervention for traumatic brain injury is at once
simple and complex. Simply stated, the brain’s cell wall is, in part,
composed of omega-3 fatty acids. “If you have a brick wall and it gets damaged,
wouldn’t you want to use bricks to repair it?” said Dr.
Michael Lewis, founder of the Brain Health
Education and Research Institute. “By
supplementing using (omega-3 fatty acids) in
substantial doses, you provide the foundation for the brain to repair itself.” More complicated is how omega-3 fatty acids might
control inflammation — or damage — in the brain.
Sears likens it to quelling a metaphorical fire in the
brain. That “fire” begins when the brain is traumatized —
as with a profound injury like Grant Virgin’s, or
milder insults like concussions suffered on a soccer
field. Neurons snap, setting off a wave of
inflammation in the brain that can smolder for long
periods of time — sometimes weeks or months after the injury has occurred. “That (inflammation) will continue over and over
unless there’s a second response that turns it off,”
said Sears, president of the Inflammation Research
Foundation. The fatty acid that Sears says can effectively “turn
off” that inflammatory fire is a metabolite (what
remains after the body breaks something down) of
eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA, called resolvin. EPA is found in fish oil. “What we think is happening is, high levels of EPA
coursing in the brain metabolize into resolvins,
turning down and turning off inflammatory process,”
said Sears. Considering that, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, 1.7 million
traumatic brain injuries occur in the United States
each year, any intervention — especially a cheap
one like fish oil — is an exciting prospect. But fish oil as a viable and well-studied intervention
is still a ways off; for now it dwells in the realm of
the anecdote or case study. There is McCloy, who recovered only a few months
after his mining accident. And a case similar to Grant Virgin’s: a teenager
named Bobby Ghassemi who nearly died in a car
accident before getting a large infusion of fish oil. A
few months later, he attended his high school
graduation. There was the case of an 8-year-old girl who nearly
drowned after her stroller rolled into a canal. Her
head and face were under water for more than five
minutes. Eighty-two days after her accident, according to a
case study published last year in the journal
PharmaNutrition, she was given high doses of
omega-3 fatty acids, after which, “…the patient
exhibited very gradual but steady progress in terms
of her tolerance for stimulation and activity.” There are seven such cases in the medical
literature, according to Sears. “Maybe the work with Randy (McCloy) was just a
lucky break,” said Sears, “But we’ve now done it
seven times. So, so far we’re 7-for-7 in severe brain
trauma.” But there are other cases — likely many more than
have been successful — when fish oil was tried and
did not work. It could be that fish oil was administered outside the
optimal therapeutic window. Or perhaps younger
brains are more receptive to the intervention (most
of the successful case studies are among young
people). And there is a concern among doctors that high
doses of fish oil could cause excessive bleeding. Those caveats, well known to Grant Virgin’s family,
did not deter them. Nine weeks after the accident, as Grant was being
transferred from an acute care to a rehabilitation
hospital, the Virgin family told doctors at the new
facility that he was already on a 20-gram-per-day
regimen of fish oil. In reality, his parents had been sneaking a few
grams of fish oil into his feeding tube for weeks, but
nothing resembling that high dosage. Two days after he began at this more aggressive
dosage, JJ Virgin got a phone call late one night. “I get this call like midnight, and I’m asleep, and I
wake up the next morning and go, ‘Did Grant call me
and did we have this whole conversation?’” she
said. “I just remember waking up the next morning
going, ‘I must have dreamed that, that couldn’t have
possibly happened.” When she arrived to the hospital the next morning, a
nurse told her that, in fact, it had not been a dream. Forty-eight hours after receiving high-dose fish oil,
Grant Virgin asked a nurse for a cell phone to call
his mother, and proceeded to have a conversation
with her. “Unbelievable,” she said. “Unbelievable.” Unbelievable, especially considering that was only
two months after Grant Virgin’s parents had been
told to “let him go.” “We had been told he’d never be able to recognize
anybody, he will never be able to focus his eyes, all
the grim stuff,” said John Virgin. “(They said) the
diffuse damage to his brain is so much that he’s
never going to be Grant again.” Today, 16 months after the accident, none of that is
true. In fact, his parents say he is even better than
he was when he made that call to his mother. “We’re not expecting Grant to get close to where he
was before, he’s going to be better than he was
before,” said his father. “And he’s progressing every
day.” The Virgin family says that progress would not be
happening if they had merely accepted what
conventional medicine told them. “I think one of the saddest things is to get to a place
and have someone tell you, ‘You should just let your
son die,’ and you don’t have the information to make
the right decision,” said JJ Virgin. “There is such hopelessness about brain injury and
there shouldn’t be.” That rampant hopelessness when it comes to
traumatic brain injury is fueling a push by Bailes and
Sears to do further studies about omega-3. (Bailes
receives research money from fish oil companies,
and Sears has his own EPA-rich formulation of fish
oil). They are on the cusp of beginning a broader study
to find out if omega-3 can be a useful intervention
for some people after traumatic brain injury. The Virgin family, based on their own dramatic
experience, is sure that omega-3 will do for others
what it did for their son. “OK, what if it didn’t do anything?” said John Virgin.
“It certainly couldn’t hurt, but what if you have this
kind of result?”