Light stimulation may help delay AD progression, more research needed in older adults

 But should it be  one of these? Has your doctor incompetently done nothing with any of these to prevent your likely dementia?

• intermittent light exposure (1 post to March 2021)

• flickering light (3 posts to February 2020)

• bright light stimulation (1 post to April 2017)

• bright light therapy (2 posts to February 2017)

• bright lighting (1 post to April 2022)

• blue light (9 posts to February 2017)

• 60 Hertz flickering light (1 post to July 2021)

• 40 Hertz flickering light (1 post to July 2021)

• led lights (1 post to August 2017)

• light therapy (10 posts to December 2011) 

• light-activated therapy (1 post to October 2013)

• low-level laser/light therapy (3 posts to December 2014) 

• naturalistic light (2 posts to August 2019)

• near infrared light (5 posts to August 2015)

• sunlight (2 posts to December 2016)

• ultraviolet light (2 posts to May 2018)

 

Your chances of dementia here. Hopefully your doctor knows this and has prepared prevention protocols.

1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study?   May 2012.

2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.

3. A 20% chance in this research.   July 2013.

4. A 2-fold increase in dementia risk in this study    Jan. 2017 

 

Light stimulation may help delay AD progression, more research needed in older adults

SAN DIEGO — Light exposure and stimulation of the locus coeruleus may be a promising way to delay Alzheimer’s disease progression, according to a presenter at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

“With light stimulation we try to target the locus coeruleus (LC), which has huge implications in earlier stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” Elise Beckers, of Limburg Alzheimer’s Centre at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said during her poster presentation. “We also know the pupil is somehow linked to LC activity and that would be an easy readout, since the pupil is more easily accessible compared to the brain.”

Source: Adobe Stock.

Understanding the role of LC structure and function in the earliest stages of AD neuropathology and that light exposure may be a promising way to delay disease progression, Beckers and colleagues sought to characterize pupil responses to light during fMRI and determine its quality in assessing non-image forming effects of light.

Researchers continuously recorded pupil diameter in 16 healthy participants (11 women), aged 16 to 30 years, with an infrared eye-tracking device while they were given a 15-minute auditory oddball task in a 7T fMRI scanner. Participants were concurrently exposed to pseudo-randomly alternating 30- to 40-second blocks of polychromatic blue (4,000 K, 200 µW/cm²) and monochromatic orange (589 nm, 6 x 1,013 photons/cm²/s) lights.

Beckers and colleagues calculated pupil response as the average pupil size during the entire block of light, and used mixed-model analysis to determine the effects of light condition on pupil response, with participants as random intercept and controlling for age, sex and BMI.

Results showed that blue light was associated with a significantly smaller pupil diameter compared with orange light (main effect of light condition: F(2,270) = 571.22). The effect of the light condition on pupil size did not significantly change over the 15-minute protocol (light condition x block repetition interaction: F(12,240) = 1.21), suggesting that time-in-protocol and previous light blocks did not affect pupil constriction.

“With light stimulation, we could modulate LC activity ... and that will be an easy technique, easily accessible and easily handleable for AD patients in the future,” Beckers said.