A
study that the United States military funded concludes that blue light can help
heal mild traumatic brain injury simply by helping the person sleep better.
Mild
traumatic brain injury (mTBI), or concussion, can result from a range of
causes, from a car accident to fights, falls, or sports.
Following
such an injury, people might see stars, become disoriented, or even lose
consciousness briefly, but many come round without realizing that they have
been concussed at all.
However,
for some, mTBI can result in weeks or months of symptoms, including headaches,
mental fogginess, dizziness, memory loss, fatigue, and disturbed sleep.
According to the researchers behind the current study, some 50% of people with mTBI complain of
chronic sleep problems after the injury, which affects their ability to think
and recover.
And 15% of those with mTBI have symptoms that last for at
least 1 year.
Scientists
believe that these symptoms occur due to the stretches and tears that the
impact inflicts on microscopic brain cells.
“Your
brain is about the consistency of thick Jell-O,” explains lead author William
D. “Scott” Killgore, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona in
Tucson. “Imagine a bowl of Jell-O getting hit from a punch or slamming against
the steering wheel in a car accident. What’s it doing? It’s absorbing that
shock and bouncing around. During that impact, microscopic brain cells thinner
than a strand of hair can easily stretch and tear and rip from the force.”
Such
injury can also occur during explosive blasts, when shock waves hitting the
soft tissue of the gut push a surge of pressure into the brain, damaging blood
vessels and brain tissue.
“Mild
traumatic brain injury (mTBI), which is commonly known as concussion, is one of
the most common injuries experienced by military personnel and is a major
health concern worldwide,” Killgore told Medical News Today.
Sleep as a healer
“At
present, there are virtually no effective treatments for concussion,” said
Killgore. “We sought a nonpharmacologic (or nondrug) method to help people.”
Killgore
and his research team received funding from the U.S. Army Medical Research and
Development Command to conduct the study, which features in the journal Neurobiology of Disease.
The
solution that they set out to prove effective was sleep.
“Because
sleep is so important for brain health and recovery, we reasoned that improving
sleep timing and duration could lead to a more rapid recovery from mTBI,” said
Killgore. “Considerable evidence suggests that sleep is important for brain
repair processes,” he added.
Killgore
explained that scientists have shown that following an injury, sleep
facilitates the production of new insulating brain cells called
oligodendrocytes.
“Without sufficient restorative sleep, the repair of
brain tissue will likely be slowed or incomplete,” Killgore said.
Blue light in the
morning
The
recent clinical trial, which involved 32 adults with mTBI, focused on
solidifying the participants’ circadian rhythm — the natural process that
dictates our 24 hour sleep-wake cycle.
The
researchers achieved this by exposing the participants to blue light from a
cube-like device for 30 minutes early each morning for 6 weeks. The
participants in the control group used amber lights instead of blue.
Source:
Medical News Today
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