The Growing Evidence for Photobiomodulation as a Promising Treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Despite the current belief that there is no effective treatment for Alzheimer's Disease (AD), one emerging modality may change this belief: Photobiomodulation (PBM). It has credible mechanisms and growing evidence to support its case. Transcranial PBM for AD is a single intervention with multiple pathway mechanisms stemming from delivering low energy near infrared (NIR) light to the mitochondria in brain cells. The mechanisms involve the activation of gene transcription that lead to neuronal recovery, removal of toxic plaques, normalizing network oscillations that can lead to improved cognition and functionality. When PBM is delivered at 810 nm wavelength and pulsed at 40 Hz, early evidence suggests that very significant outcomes are possible. Literature related to PBM and AD has covered in vitro cellular, animal and human case reports, with promising results. They warrant robust randomized trials which are either ongoing or ready to start. The evidence in human studies is manifested in assessment scales such ADAS-cog, MMSE, and ADAS-ADL, and are supported by fMRI imaging and EEG.

Proceedings of the 2019 ISNR Annual Conference

“…In PBM, near infrared (NIR) light directed to the default mode network (DMN) at selected pulses could produce large brain responses. This has been suggested in studies involving dementia (Lim, 2018;Saltmarche, Naeser, Ho, Hamblin, & Lim, 2017;Zomorrodi, Saltmarche, Loheswaran, Ho, & Lim, 2017) and acute cognitive processing (Heinrich et al, 2019). In a controlled study that specifically explored neural response to 40 Hz directed to the DMN of healthy subjects (the Gamma EEG study), it was found that the power spectrum and connectivity of alpha, beta, and gamma increased significantly.…”

Impacto terapêutico da fotobiomodulação no tratamento da doença de Alzheimer: Uma revisão integrativa

“…As pesquisas que envolvem a PBM em pacientes com Doença de Alzheimer são ainda escassas e relativamente recentes, porém, os resultados já obtidos são significativos e promissores, pois apresentam indícios que é possível reverter alguns quadros de perdas cognitivas através de alterações celulares e melhorias circulatórias, medidas através de testes cognitivos e exames de imagem, respectivamente (Lim, 2018…”

Photobiomodulation for Alzheimer’s Disease: Translating Basic Research to Clinical Application

“…As stated by Hashmi et al in their article about the role of PBM in neurorehabilitation [20], transcranial PBM with low level red to NIR light had already been used on human subjects with moderate AD before the year 2010, although no peer reviewed publications existed as of then. This is slowly changing, with new devices being developed and more individuals being treated in pilot trials, confirming improvements in the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-cognitive and enhanced Neuropsychiatric Inventory scores, as well as an increase in regional cerebral blood flow and increased connectivity of the default mode network [29,[48][49][50][51][52][53].…”