Near Infra-red Light Treatment Of Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease.The symptoms include memory and spatial learning difficulties,language disorders,loss of action ability et al.which get worse over time and eventually end in death.Currently,the main treatment method is pharmacotherapy.However,these existing treatments only attenuate symptoms temporarily and are associated with severe side effects.Therefore,non-drug methods get more and more attention.Near infra-red light(NIR),as a physical treatment,has a lot of biological effects,which include wound healing,pain reduction,growth factor release and cytoprotection.More and more studies indicated the effects of NIR on nervous system.Therefore,we tried NIR to treat Alzheimer's disease.The mouse model we used was genetically-modified with two genes called amyloid precursor protein gene with Swedish mutation and presenilin-1 gene with exon-9 mutation.Firstly,we treated the mice with NIR for 40 days.Then the irradiation was suspended for 28 days.Finally,another 15 day treatment was brought to mice.We conducted Morris water maze and immunofluorescence analysis to evaluate the treatment effect of NIR.Our results show that NIR has a significant effect on treatment of Alzheimer's disease and represents a potential method for clinical applications.