Medical application for LEDs

Timex writes "Doctors at the Medical College of Wisconsin are finding that near-infrared light from LEDs originally designed for commercial plant growth research in space are useful in healing hard-to-heal wounds. more information is available from their press section"

Bring forth the Tricorder

[Bojay Iverson]

After all, isn't this where the technology will lead?

Hu?

[azephrahel]

I know I"m not a doctor, and I'm not a biologist,but how/why would infared (ok near infared) light aid/speed up healing? Radiation of that sort causes minute mutations in cells, but doesn't make them regenerate faster. So how does it work? The explination, to paraphrase, "increases energy in the cells" is far to vague to be a decent explination. How does it work? On a chemical/biological level?

Sorry I just have a hard time buying this.

Re:Hu?

[mellifluous]

IR radiation does not have sufficient energy to penetrate a cell and alter its chromosomes (which is what I assume you mean by mutation). It could affect chemical reactions within the cell in any number of ways, but it is essentially impossible for IR to cause a mutation.

I do agree, however, that the article could have afforded to present at least one hypothesis about what is going on here.

counter-intuitive

[bluelip]

IANAD (DOCTOR), but it seems like this type of treatment would cause more to damage than to heal? Is this another type of homeopathy (Like heals like)? This would be the only way I could see this working.

IR effects on cells?

[kstantfw]

In response to the previous poster, I don't know of any evidence for IR causing mutations. In general, light must be high enough energy (i.e. short enough wavelength) to cause chemical changes in DNA to cause mutations. UV light causes mutations by photo-induced dimerization of thymine. X-rays cause mutations by producing breaks in DNA strands. I can't think of a mechanism by which IR could cause a mutagenic effect.

In fact, I'm sceptical that the reported effect is real, as it's hard to see what effect IR light would have on cells, unless there's a particular receptor for it, or it works by some non-specific mechanism, such as heating the cells. And I actually am a biophysicist :)

EM radiation and possible healing mechanism

[spineboy]

Well, I am a doctor (Orthopaedic surgery resident). We use quite often a PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic field generator) device to help heal fractures which haven't healed well or are healing too slowly. It seems that the EM field induces an electric charge on the bone. Bone responds to a neg electric field and is induced to grow more bone, thus improving healing times.
Here's a link to EBI medical systems [ebimedical.com] - they're one of the makers of bone stimulators.

An interesting side note - ultrasonic sound has also been used to the same effect. It's proported mechanism is the same as above and possibly that it induces more blood flow into the area which is always beneficial to (bone) healing.

Thus it's not unreasonable that the LEDs might locally increase blood flow and aid in healing.

Photochemistry is still a rather largely unexplored area of chemistry/medicine. The ATP explanation I saw in another post whereby ATPs energy is released by IR light is highly unlikely and doesn't make sense, biochemically speaking, as to why that would help - it's energy has to be directed at a process/reaction.

Anecdotally I do remember that some summer sunlight would always clear up my zits as a teenager - your guess as to the reason is as good as mine.

Re:Not entirely unrelated

[IANAL - thank god]

UV treatment is based on the physical fact that bilirubin (which is exessively present in neonatal jaundice due to immature liver degradation systems) is transformed into excretable fractions by UV light stimulation. This is pretty far from some vague pseudoscience crap like "the LEDs boost energy to the cells". Not that I consider it to be impossible, but those people will have to be a little bit more convincing than just saying "and he can cure cancer with his LEDs too!" (with a photosensitive drug - duh) And yes, IAAD

PLants and IR

[OmegaDan]

I seem to recall that plant chlorophyl (sp?) needs two specific frequencies of light in the 600-700nm range to grow and thats it ... Can they make LED's to improve my, um, closet horticulture? :)

If you really like LEDs

[AintTooProudToBeg]

then you need to visit the LED Museum [att.net]

Hmmm...

[Mister Transistor]

IANAD... (Doctor, Dork, whatever...) but I have heard of using HeNe Lasers (red, 632 Nm) for healing skin wounds and removal of various localized uglinesses of the skin. If there's any validity to that method, then IR Lasers might also provide some benefit. As for mutations, sorry. Light is considered a non-ionizing radiation, and as such, doesn't cause the DNA to get resequenced (mutated). Frequencies at or above "ionizing radiation" (X-rays, Gamma rays, etc.) do this to human tissue. Frequencies below just cause tissue to heat up (and possibly causes cell rupture) as it absorbs the energy.

Re:Bring forth the Tricorder

[glebite]

Utter coolness...

Yes, it appears that we are moving forward to accelerated healing though light-emitting devices. I doubt that we'd see immediate healing, but a 40-50% speedup in recovery would certainly reduce hospital stays, and allow people to get back to their lives faster. If it's as inobtrusive as just holding the device up to the healing area, then this would allow for home use as well...

But one thing I'd be interested in is whether the speedup has some future side-effect issue such as cells not lining up properly because they're normal process is accelerated.

Other than that, oh yeah!

Re:Not entirely unrelated

[Siqnal 11]

...vague pseudoscience crap...

Did you read the article [mcw.edu] from the Medical College of Wisconsin?

IANAD, but I seem to recall something called the Scientific Method [xnet.com], which is the accepted way by which scientists, collectively and over time, construct an accurate (that is, reliable, consistent and non-arbitrary) representation of our existence. The researchers are in the middle of that process now, so you should probably hold off on your judgements until they're finished. Then, maybe you'll have something 'a little bit more convincing'.

Then again, maybe not.

--

Not entirely unrelated

[Siqnal 11]

The use of UV as a treatment for neo-natal jaundice is a well-established medical procedure.

--

Re:Not entirely unrelated

[IANAL - thank god]

I did read the article Like I said, I don't believe what they state to be impossible. I agree that in the scientific method of yours (and mine) you observe, hypothesise and verify. However, - I'm at liberty to rotfl when a hypothesis ("brings energy to the cell" or whatever) sounds like a sixties mantra - I think it's pretty lame to correlate this alleged healing stuff to other forms of light therapy that don't have much common ground with the situation at hand(yes, you can "cure" cancer with light...IF you administer a really toxic drug that binds to the cancer cells and starts becoming toxic when lit. This does not prove some super mystical healing property of light beams.) Then again, maybe so. We'll see.

Re:Not entirely unrelated

[IANAL - thank god]

Crappy HTML button! Let's try that again...

I did read the article. Like I said, I don't believe what they state to be impossible. I agree that in the scientific method of yours (and mine) you observe, hypothesise and verify. However,

- I'm at liberty to rotfl when a hypothesis ("brings energy to the cell" or whatever) sounds like a sixties mantra
- I think it's pretty lame to correlate this alleged healing stuff to other forms of light therapy that don't have much common ground with the situation at hand(yes, you can "cure" cancer with light...IF you administer a really toxic drug that binds to the cancer cells and starts becoming toxic when lit. This does not prove some super mystical healing property of light beams.)

Then again, maybe so. We'll see.

Not new news... been studied for years

[Pentapod]

This isn't a newsflash, scientists have been studying the effects of various kinds of radiation on tissue healing for years now. Studies have focused mainly on lasers and LEDs.

"stimulating effects (from therapeutic light) are reported following irradiation with non-laser sources ... this view is not difficult to accept when it is remembered that wave-length dependent photobiochemical reactions occur throughout nature and are involved in such things as vision, photosynthesis, tanning and Vitamin D metabolism. In this view, laser therapy is really a form of light therapy, and lasers are important in that they are convenient sources of intense light at wavelengths that stimulate specific physiological functions" (Lasers in Surgery and Medicine 9:1-5, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, 1989).

LED's and LASERS are no more than convenient devices for producing electromagnetic radiation at specific wavelengths. The reason for the stimulation of human tissue is not 100% understood yet but various hypotheses and claims have been made both by scientists and less reliable holistic-healer types.

The most reasonable seems to me to be that the release of energy from cellular storage requires the input of energy. All food turns into ATP (adenosine triphosphate) before it is utilized by the cells. ATP provides the chemical energy that drives the chemical reaction of the cell, but (if I recall my Cellular Metabolism class correctly) it requires a small energy input to release the potential energy stored in the ATP. If the addition of mild radiation to the tissue can be used to stimulate the release of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) then the increases in ATP would allow cells to accept nutrients faster and get rid of waste products faster by increasing the energy level in the cell.

An alternative hypothesis is that the mild IR radiation could be interpreted by the cell as a potential danger, triggering the cell's defense mechanisms to kick into high-gear and speeding up defense and healing processes. However, considering how many beneficial roles radiation plays in our cellular processes (like vitamin D synthesis) I prefer the first hypothesis. (And hell, when you walk around in the sunshine, don't you just feel *good*? Skin tingling, blood flowing, you just feel more alive and healthy don't you?)

Pentapod

Medical...LEDs

[onjay]

At the recent Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference in Chicago, there was a lecture on optical imaging of the brain. I was skeptical (it goes through the skull HOW?). They showed that they could use different frequencies and short pulses to get a low-res view of the brain, largely by calculation of diffusion path lengths. They said that they could detect large asymmetries that you would see with a subdural bleed. Useful, but obvious. Then they said that they could detect smaller regional changes in blood flow caused by brain activity. Skeptical? So was I...Then they put a helmet on one of the researchers and showed raw signal over the motor strip and how it changed when he thought about moving his hand. That was very cool. Sure there are limitations because of the skull, but with a tighter matrix of emitters/detectors and some DSP power, this could be very useful.

Details? All I am sure of is that they were from a university in California. I'll dig around, though.

NB- This is not THAT different from the really really common use of LEDs to measure blood oxygenation and heartrate. It's all bloodflow.

very cool

[arete]

this is quite impressive - I'm not terribly surprised about the _general_ vein of this - but they're talking about 50% of the healing time - that's very impressive.