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Infrared light therapy has shown promise in treating Alzheimer’s, according to British research, and Ted McWhorter of the Evangeline Home Health Agency in Lafayette said that the EHHA will be leading the way on American research.
McWhorter said that most work on Alzheimer’s has been on slowing the symptoms, but that the British research has opened the door to a possible means of reversing the debilitating disease.
“We’ve got a piece of research that’s come in from the United Kingdom ... that says infrared light therapy has had an effect on artificially induced Alzheimer’s in laboratory animals,”
“It really did do a hell of a job on the rats; they returned to the capacity to learn complicated tasks that they had previously had.”
At current rates, Alzheimer’s is expected to affect over 10 million baby boomers, at a cost of billions of dollars every year.
McWhorter said that the research, approved by the Food and Drug Administration, will be led by Dr. Tom Burke, who recently retired from the University of Colorado Health Science Center after over 25 years of teaching.
“He knows what he’s doing. He’s the most-published author of research in low-intensity light therapy in the United States,” McWhorter said.
Patients 65 or over and on Medicare can be recommended by their physicians for the treatment, which involves cranial exposure to 890 nanometer wavelength three sessions a week, 45 minutes per session, for eight weeks.
The device used to administer the infrared light is noninvasive and can be self-administered.
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