United States: In the latest research, it is provided a clue that Low-level light therapy treats the brain injury of patients who are the victim of moderate-level TBI.
It remains, however, unknown what other increases or decreases the therapy may cause in the long run; however, the treatment is described as a valuable tool by which multiple neurological disorders can be effectively managed.
This study has the added advantage of pointing out an applicative modality, such as light therapy, as a noninvasive treatment.
More about the Low-level light therapy
According to the study published in the journal Radiology, Low-level light therapy impacts the healing of the brain in people who have gone through major brain injuries.
Different colors of light of different wavelengths have been known to have healed wounds for several years now. However, to evaluate the effectiveness of low-level light therapy, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) tried it on 38 patients with a moderate traumatic brain injury; an injury to the head that is bad enough to impair someone’s thinking or cause them to be unconscious for a while or have abnormal brain imaging.
Patients’ trauma surgery included the administration of a helmet that emits near-infrared light in a period not exceeding 72 hours, neurosciencenews.com reported.
According to Rajiv Gupta, M.D., Ph.D., the study co-lead author working in the Department of Radiology at MGH, “The skull is quite transparent to near-infrared light,” and “Once you put the helmet on, your whole brain is bathing in this light.”
More about the conduction of research
Researchers employed a method known as functional MRI to measure the impact of the light therapy. Those researchers were interested in the brain’s resting-state functional connectivity, which shows how regions of the brain link and communicate with other parts in the region when a patient is not doing a particular task.
The researchers compared MRI results during three recovery phases: the acute phase, the subacute phase that occurs in the first week of injury, and the late-subacute phase that occurs within three months after the injury.
Therefore, in the study involving 38 patients, 21 of them were not exposed to light treatment while donning the helmet. This was done to act as a control and reduce bias in patient characteristics as well as to avoid a possible placebo effect.
Those who underwent low-level light therapy had a more robust change in resting-state connectivity in seven premade pairs of brain regions in the acute-to-subacute recovery stage compared with the control patients.
According to Nathaniel Mercaldo, Ph.D., a statistician with MGH and who is the study coauthor, “There was increased connectivity in those receiving light treatment, primarily within the first two weeks,” neurosciencenews.com reported.
“We were unable to detect differences in connectivity between the two treatment groups long term, so although the treatment appears to increase the brain connectivity initially, its long-term effects are still to be determined,” Mercaldo added.
Moreover, the study coauthor Suk-tak Chan, Ph.D., a biomedical engineer at MGH, said, “There is still a lot of work to be done to understand the exact physiological mechanism behind these effects,” as Neuroscience News reported.
However, Dr. Gupta added, “There are lots of disorders of connectivity, mostly in psychiatry, where this intervention may have a role,” and “PTSD, depression, autism: these are all promising areas for light therapy.”