Flickering lights show some promise for finding a treatment for Alzheimer's disease.
In the ongoing battle to find a way to prevent and cure Alzheimer’s disease, a recently announced study has found some encouragement by using a therapy of flickering lights at a precise frequency to stimulate the brain’s own defenses against the disease, according to a report in the LA Times.
The research is in its infancy and it will be quite a while before the treatment can be applied to human subjects, even if the trials prove to be effective, but a new company, Cognito Therapeutics, Inc., has formed to approach the Food and Drug Administration about doing clinical trials and continue the research.
It it estimated the this year, 5.4 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s, a disease that impairs the cognitive function and causes progressive memory loss in its victims.
The study demonstrated the rhythmic electric impulses in the brain, called gamma oscillations, seem to activate the brain’s microglia, immune cells that act as a cleaning agent in the brain.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using laboratory mice for the testing, placed the animals in a box with LED lights flickering at exactly 40 Hz, and noted the visual cortex of the animals began to respond at the same frequency.
After an hour in front of the lights, the animals, which were bred to develop plaques and tangles found in brains of humans with Alzheimer’s, were found to have reduced levels of amyloid protein in the visual cortices. This suggested to the researchers the immune cells were doing a better job of cleaning up the proteins.
The testing continued for a select group of the mice for a week, and those receiving the therapy had 67 percent fewer amyloid plaques than their counterparts with out the exposure.
This particular research was limited to the visual cortex, which is not one of the brain’s regions typically harmed by amyloid plaques in humans early on in the disease, but researchers are hopeful that other parts of the human brain may respond to the lights, with a different frequency or delivery method.
“I think we have something very fundamentally different,” said Li-Huei Tsai, a senior author on the study, when discussing previous attempts at developing an anti-amyloid treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
Findings from the study were published in the journal Nature.