Morning blue light treatment improves sleep complaints, symptom severity, and retention of fear extinction memory in PTSD

[David PS]

Ray Peat has cautioned us about the harmful effects of blue light and wavelengths of radiation that are shorter than the blue wavelengths. However as is often the case, the dose is the poison. The study below suggests that an intentional addition of a small dose of blue light in the morning may be helpful for some people.

Sunlight has a circadian pattern and Ray has spoken about the benefical effects of the red light associated with early morning sunlight. Coincidently, early morning sunlight has very little blue light. I am wondering is the amount of blue light in the morning sunlight is not quite enough to turn-off the systemic melatonin in some people.

@Inaut posted a YouTube video in a thread about green light that mentioned blue light as being important in Syntonic Therapy.

Morning blue light treatment improves sleep complaints, symptom severity, and retention of fear extinction memory in post-traumatic stress disorder

Disrupted sleep is a major feature in numerous clinical disorders and is related to decrements in affective memory processing. The prevalence of sleep disruption in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is suggested to be a key feature that exacerbates ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Disrupted sleep is a major feature in numerous clinical disorders and is related to decrements in affective memory processing. The prevalence of sleep disruption in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is suggested to be a key feature that exacerbates the impaired ability to recall extinction memories during experimental fear conditioning. We hypothesized that an intervention employing blue-wavelength light therapy (BLT) to regulate sleep and stabilize circadian rhythms in patients with PTSD (i.e., via regulated morning exposure) would be associated with PTSD symptom improvement, decreased sleep-related complaints, as well as improved consolidation and retention of extinction memories relative to a fear conditioning/extinction paradigm. Eighty-two individuals with PTSD underwent a well-validated fear conditioning/extinction protocol with subsequent assignment to receive morning BLUE (BLT) or placebo AMBER (ALT) light therapy daily for 30-min over 6-weeks. Participants returned after the intervention for post-treatment extinction recall, comprised of exposure to the previously conditioned stimuli, with the difference in skin conductance response between the “extinguished” and the “never-extinguished” stimuli at follow-up. Participants also viewed previously conditioned stimuli in a novel context during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan. BLUE light therapy was associated with improvements relative to correlated decreases between PTSD symptoms and sleep-related complaints. Participants receiving BLT also sustained retention of the extinction memory, while those in the placebo amber light treatment group showed impairment, characterized by the restoration of the extinguished fear response after 6-weeks. Participants in the ALT also demonstrated greater reactivity in the left insula when viewing the previously extinguished fear-conditioned stimuli in a novel context. Daily BLUE-wavelength morning light exposure was associated with greater retention of extinction learning in patients with PTSD when compared to ALT, as supported by both autonomic and neurobiological reactivity. We speculate that improved sleep facilitated by a stabilized circadian rhythm, after fear-learning, led to greater consolidation of the fear extinction memory, decreased PTSD symptom presentation, and associated decreases in sleep-related complaints. Prominent exposure treatments for PTSD incorporate principles of fear extinction, and our findings suggest that blue light treatment may facilitate treatment gains by promoting the consolidation of extinction memories via improved sleep.

 

[Inaut]

A few years ago I thought I had a good idea. I realized it wasn’t new (under the sun).... The idea was an led interior lighting system that modulates the spectrum of the led as the day turns to night. It could greatly benefit those of us living in winter wonderlands. Ex would be reds in the morning, blue/green mid morning/early afternoon etc. It would be interesting to see studies on living in this type of environment as well

 

[David PS]

Blue Light Exposure Just Twice A Day Causes Insulin Resistance In Humans

No need to elaborate, given how much Ray has written about red and blue light and their effects on metabolism. The key result from the study was that just 3 hours of exposure was enough to trigger that metabolic dysfunction. Imagine what happens at night when there is ambient blue light...

raypeatforum.com

 

[YourUniverse]

Very nice, thank you