Light Treatment Helps Alleviate Symptoms in Alzheimer's Patients

Alzheimer's disease is currently the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and it's expected to affect 16 million people by 2050, up from 5.4 million today. Researchers from the Lighting Research Center believe they can help these patients.

Mariana Figueiro, the Light and Health program director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and her researchers found that light treatment can improve sleep, depression, and agitation in Alzheimer's disease patients.

"It is a simple, inexpensive, non-pharmacological treatment to improve sleep and behavior in Alzheimer's disease and dementia patients," said Figueiro in a news release. "The improvements we saw in agitation and depression were very impressive."

The small study involved 14 nursing home patients with Alzheimer's disease or a related form of dementia. The light treatment administered on these patients increased their circadian stimulation during the daytime, which was found to improve symptoms in these patients. A circadian rhythm is a 24-hour cycle in the physiological processes of humans and it's important in determining one's sleeping and feeding patterns, as well as hormone production and cell regeneration.

The researchers installed a light source producing low levels of 300 to 400 lux of a bluish-white light with a color temperature of more than 9000 Kelvin. All pertinent information was documented: light-dark and activity-rest patterns prior to and after the installation of the lighting system, and then the patients answered questionnaires that sought to measure sleep quality, depression, and agitation.

These questionnaires revealed improvement in these conditions that are significantly affected by Alzheimer's disease. Additionally, the nursing staff supplied the researchers with subjective reports in regards to the patients' overall behavior, also documenting improvements.

The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York presented their study's findings on Monday at the 28^th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, LLC, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The findings were also published in the journal Sleep.