LED Light Therapy Can Aid In Alzheimer’s Disease Treatments
http://odishasamaya.com/news/health/led-light-therapy-can-aid-in-alzheimers-disease-treatments/64403
Good lighting is essential to an individual’s well being. In healthy individuals, a lack of natural or full-spectrum lighting leads to circadian rhythm disturbances or sleep disorders, which may affect the heart, mental health and other systems in the body. When an individual has a cognitive impairment, light therapy for Alzheimer’s patients and those with dementia is vital to naturally regulating sleep cycles and promoting positive emotional and physical health.
“This work has significance as it was the first case to use light and photo-sensitisers to stop deposits of beta-amyloids,” said one of the lead researchers Chan Beum Park from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea.
Light-induced treatments using organic photosensitisers have advantages to managing the treatment in time and area. In the case of cancer treatments, doctors use photodynamic therapies where a patient is injected with an organic photo-sensitiser, and a light is shed on the patient’s
lesion. However, such therapies had never been employed to treat neurodegenerative diseases. This research finding suggests new ways to treat neurodegenerative illnesses including Alzheimer’s disease.
Treatments with light provide benefits over standard drug treatments because less medication is needed than other drug treatments, and there are fewer side effects, the researchers noted.
They plan further studies to learn if this technique can be used to suppress beta-amyloid creation at an early stage of the disease. If so, this therapy could potentially be used to prevent Alzheimer’s disease or halt its progress, they said.
Alzheimer’s starts when a protein called beta-amyloid is created and deposited in a patient’s brain.
