Everyone’s eyeing hydrogen theraphy. But does it work?

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I sit in a London health centre, inhaling air enriched with hydrogen through a tube. At the same time the gas is piped into a pair of goggles where it plays across my eyes in a gentle breeze. 

This is my first experience of molecular hydrogen therapy, which has been popular in Japan and China for several years and is now picking up in the west. As word spreads of its potential benefits as a wide-ranging antioxidant, wellness centres are adding hydrogen to their menu of treatments.

I am a mainstream science journalist who takes a generally sceptical view of alternative therapies. Yet I was intrigued enough by anecdotes from friends and acquaintances who have benefited from molecular hydrogen to look into the evidence for its effects. Might the gas really have a role to play in healthcare?

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My introductory session was at Suhaku Space in South Kensington, where owner Atsue Morinaga, a physiotherapist and acupuncturist from Japan, introduced hydrogen inhalation therapy in May 2023. Then I visited The Wellness Lab in Knightsbridge, where director Jaynee Treon, a holistic health practitioner, has offered hydrogen since 2021.

The clinics generate hydrogen in an electrolytic cell that splits water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen. The concentrations used – typically around two per cent hydrogen – are far below the levels that can burn or explode in air.

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 Both centres explain clearly the scientific rationale for hydrogen therapy – how the gas reduces oxidative stress throughout the body, for example by scavenging free radicals such as hydroxyl. I certainly felt better after my sessions, though I was there more in a spirit of journalistic inquiry than to treat specific symptoms. My nose and airways were noticeably clearer, and my eyes felt bright and sparkling. As a strong believer in the placebo effect – if you expect something to make you better, it will – I can’t prove the benefits I experienced were caused directly by the hydrogen, but I am happy to give it some credit. To demonstrate an immediate effect, Suhaku invites clients to look through a microscope at tiny blood vessels below the skin at the base of their fingernails, before and after therapy. The hydrogen did seem to untwist some of my more contorted capillaries and improve the flow of blood.

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Hydrogen therapy has a long history, with experiments going back more than two centuries, says John Hancock, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. “But scientific interest was sporadic until 2007 when Ikuroh Ohsawa and colleagues at Nippon Medical School published a landmark paper in Nature Medicine.”

That experiment in Japan demonstrated an anti-inflammatory effect of hydrogen, which reduced damage to tissues suffering oxidative stress. “Since then there have been more than 2,000 studies of potential medical applications,” says Hancock. They have covered diseases that could benefit from hydrogen therapy, including diabetes, arthritis and other inflammatory conditions. No toxic side-effects have been reported.

But all the studies carried out so far have been relatively small, points out Grace Russell, also at UWE. “I would like it to come out of the fringes of wellbeing and lifestyle,” she says. “Data from a larger trial focusing on inflammation, involving thousands of people rather than the tens or hundreds so far, is the key thing needed to bring it into the medical mainstream.”

Russell says one barrier to raising funds for a large clinical trial is that funders like to know the biological basis of a proposed therapy. Scientists are beginning to investigate how hydrogen – a molecule that is biologically inert – may have effects on the body but the mechanisms are uncertain. No NHS hospitals or clinics have adopted the therapy in the UK. “Some people see hydrogen as snake-oil therapy – which it clearly is not,” she says. “I think there is potential for it at least to mitigate the biochemistry that happens when we are ill.”

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 In the US, Tyler W LeBaron has run a Molecular Hydrogen Institute promoting scientific information about the therapy since 2013. “Unfortunately there has been a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience,” he says. “But the number of wellness clinics offering various sorts of hydrogen therapy is growing fast in the US.” One method becoming popular is bathing in hydrogen water. “People take a bath of high-concentration hydrogen water,” LeBaron says. “That’s a really cool method of administration because the hydrogen molecule is so small that it’ll permeate right through the skin.” Hydrogenated bathing sounds delightful, but for now I am happy to inhale the therapeutic gas. Personally, I’ll continue to give hydrogen a go, though the scientific jury is still out.