Could the answer to fighting Alzheimer鈥檚 disease be as simple as a flickering light?
An hour a day of light therapy has been found to break down Alzheimer鈥檚-like brain deposits in mice. That鈥檚 a long way from it working in people, but because it seems
a safe therapy, it could move quickly into human trials. 鈥淭his is really intriguing because it鈥檚 such an unexpected and brand new method for tackling the disease,鈥� says of the University of Exeter, UK, who was not involved in the work.
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his聽team exposed mice to a light聽flickering at 40鈥卙ertz. This聽triggered brain cells to oscillate together, creating gamma waves 鈥� a type of brain activity that is often weaker in people with Alzheimer鈥檚.
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After they had been exposed to聽the light for an hour a day for a聽week, the rodents鈥� brains contained fewer beta-amyloid plaques, which are hallmarks of the disease. The light seemed to boost the activity of cells that clear amyloid, and cut amyloid production.
Tau tangles
Most treatments developed for Alzheimer鈥檚 so far target beta-amyloid. Although several of these drugs have produced promising results in mice, they have failed to halt mental deterioration in people. This may be because beta-amyloid plaques are the wrong target, and tangles of tau protein that form inside brain cells could be the real culprit.
But Boyden鈥檚 team has found that the light therapy reduced the number of tau tangles in the rodents鈥� brains too, although it鈥檚 unknown how this happened.
There鈥檚 a hitch though 鈥� beta-amyloid and tau tangles were only reduced in the animals鈥� visual cortex,聽not in the memory areas that the disease damages first. But聽Boyden still plans to try light therapy in people, perhaps using a phone or a computer screen.
If light doesn鈥檛 work, the group plans to try inducing gamma waves in the hippocampus using electrodes on the head or implanted into the brain.
There are also drugs in early development that promote gamma waves over the whole brain, says Brown.
Nature
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