Effects of Bright Light Therapy on Sleep, Cognition, Brain Function, and Neurochemistry in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.

摘要

The study has made substantial progress over the past year. The emerging data on cognition, emotion, and subjective sleep suggest that six weeks of morning Blue Light Therapy versus comparable Amber Light Placebo supports our initial hypotheses that the treatment would improve sleep and cognition. Emerging data from functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks also suggest that the Blue Light condition was effective in altering brain responses during two demanding attention and working memory tasks, whereas such changes were not evident in the Amber Light Placebo condition. Overall, these findings suggest that the Blue Light treatment improved hippocampal functioning during working memory and was associated with prefrontal cortex activation during an attention-based conflict monitoring task. The initial findings point toward some beneficial effects of the active treatment in reducing daytime sleepiness and sleep-related functional impairments, improving subjective sleep, showing clinically significant improvements in attention, and affecting functional brain responses. The current data set is still small and we are exploring avenues to increase sample size to obtain sufficient power to detect reliable effects.