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June 7, 2020 07:34 pm

Could Brain Diseases Like Alzheimer's Be Treated With Flashing Lights?

Writing for Quanta magazine, an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of Maryland described an intriguing study led by MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai:Incredible as it may sound, the researchers improved the brains of animals with Alzheimer's simply by using LED lights that flashed 40 times a second. Even sound played at this charmed frequency, 40 hertz, had a similar effect.... Exposing the mice to both stimuli, a light show synchronized with pulsating sound, had an even more powerful effect, reducing amyloid plaques [a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease] in regions throughout the cerebral cortex, including the prefrontal region, which carries out higher-level executive functions that are impaired in Alzheimer's. I was amazed, so just to make sure I wasn't getting unduly excited about the possibility of using flashing lights and sounds to treat humans, I talked to Hiroaki Wake, a neuroscientist at Kobe University in Japan who was not involved with the work. "It would be fantastic!" he said. "The treatment may also be effective for a number of neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's disease and ALS," where microglia also play a role... Tsai's team has just begun assessing their strobe-light method on patients, and they're sure to be joined by others as more researchers learn of this promising work. According to the article, another study at the Georgia Institute of Technology is investigating a specific mechanism with which doctors "could potentially treat different diseases just by varying the light and sound rhythms they use. "The different stimuli would rock the neurons into producing appropriate brain wave frequencies, causing nearby microglia to release specific types of cytokines, which tell microglia in general how to go to work repairing the brain."

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