Shining a Green Light on a New Preventive Therapy for Migraine
martyb writes:
Shining a Green Light on a New Preventive Therapy for Migraine:
In the United States, nearly 1 in 4 households includes someone with migraine, a neurological disease with extremely incapacitating symptoms, and almost everyone knows someone who suffers from migraine headaches.
According to the Migraine Research Foundation, more than 90% of sufferers are unable to function normally during their migraine, which can be accompanied by visual disturbances, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, extreme sensitivity to sound, light, touch and smell, and tingling or numbness in the extremities or face.
Migraine can also be difficult for physicians to treat. Traditional therapies range from oral medications, which may have side effects, to Botox injections, nerve blocks or implantable nerve stimulators - each with varying degrees of success. But a new potential treatment that uses green light exposure is offering people who suffer from migraine new hope thanks to researchers at the University of Arizona Health Sciences.
[...] Mohab Ibrahim, MD, PhD, and Amol Patwardhan, MD, PhD, both of whom are affiliated with the Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center, a strategic initiative of UArizona Health Sciences, have been studying the effects of green light exposure in rodents for several years. Recently Dr. Ibrahim led a research team that completed the first clinical study to evaluate green light exposure as a potential preventive therapy for patients with migraine.
"Migraine is one of the most common neurological conditions in the world, and it's debilitating," said Dr. Ibrahim, lead author of the study, associate professor in the UArizona College of Medicine - Tucson's Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology, and Neurosurgery and director of the Chronic Pain Management Clinic.
Twenty-nine participants, all of whom had failed multiple traditional therapies for migraine, were prescribed green light exposure as part of the study.
"In this trial, we treated green light as a drug," Dr. Ibrahim said. "It's not any green light; it has to be the right intensity, the right frequency, the right exposure time and the right exposure methods. Just like with medications, there is a sweet spot with light."
Journal Reference:
Laurent F Martin, Amol M Patwardhan, Sejal V Jain, et al. Evaluation of green light exposure on headache frequency and quality of life in migraine patients: A preliminary one-way cross-over clinical trial:, Cephalalgia (DOI: 10.1177/0333102420956711)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.