Sunday, November 10, 2024

Bright Light Therapy Might Help In Treating Depressive Disorders: Study

 

 This from April 2017 should have already triggered this therapy for all the depression in survivors created by not having 100% RECOVERY PROTOCOLS, since it produces BDNF. But your incompetent hospital didn't have enough brains to extrapolate the benefits of this in rats to humans.  Do you prefer your hospital incompetence NOT KNOWING OR NOT DOING?

Resetting Body Clock May Help the Brain to Heal April 2017 

The latest here:

Bright Light Therapy Might Help In Treating Depressive Disorders: Study

Updated Nov 5, 2024, 05:32am EST

Major depressive disorder is a debilitating disability that impacts around 5% of adults worldwide. While doctors commonly prescribe antidepressants to patients, it has several side effects and might not always succeed in preventing relapses of depressive episodes. A non-pharmacological solution that could effectively treat depressive disorders is bright light therapy. Patients with non-seasonal depression who were treated with bright light therapy reported a 40% remission rate, according to a recent study.

“The primary supportive argument in favor of using bright light as an adjunctive treatment is the cost. Even though outpatient treatment costs with antidepressants are widely variable, exposure to external light generally involves no costs or limitations, which reinforces the need to firm bright light therapy as an efficient adjunctive treatment for non-seasonal depressive disorders,” the researchers wrote in their study that was published in JAMA Psychiatry.

Prior studies have shown that light exposure can affect people’s mood and cognitive functioning. Researchers say that happens when bright light enters the inner surface of the retina where neurons called retinal ganglion cells are located. These neurons transmit visual information from the retina to brain areas responsible for mood regulation like the amygdala, suprachiasmatic nucleus, and the dorsal raphe nucleus.

To delve deeper into how bright light therapy could help in treating non-seasonal depression, the researchers analyzed the data from studies that included 858 participants who were diagnosed with depressive disorders. The study participants were made to sit in front of a fluorescent light box that produced extremely bright white light at an intensity of 10,000 lux for at least 30 minutes daily. “Patients treated with bright light therapy had a significantly higher remission rate (40%) than the control groups who were only treated with anti-depressants (23%),” the team observed. “These findings suggest that bright light therapy was an effective adjunctive treatment for non-seasonal depressive disorders, and the response time to the initial treatment may be improved with the addition of bright light therapy.”

“Our results do not underscore the need for randomized clinical trials with larger follow-up periods but strengthen the theory that patients treated with bright light therapy acquire remission of symptoms and response rate more rapidly than patients treated only with antidepressants,” the authors added.


For three decades, bright light therapy has been used to treat sleep disorders like delayed sleep phase syndrome, which is characterized by people falling asleep only several hours after midnight and difficulties waking up in the morning.

Bright light therapy works by slowly tweaking and shifting people's sleep patterns. The light boxes are also used to treat seasonal depression in the Global North during winters.

Your healthcare provider must determine the right duration of bright light exposure and the correct light intensity for the therapy to have tangible results. Studies have also found that bright light therapy might work best along with antidepressants.

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