 |
|
|||||
|
||||||
There was a great article in the Star Tribune Parade insert this weekend. Dr Oz, who was often a guest on Oprah and now has his own show, has some very easy to follow advice for better sleep. It’s all information that we have posted on our site before, but it bears repeating in case you missed it.
“Nearly half of all Americans have occasional insomnia…”
Click here for the link to the article and start experiencing restorative sleep tonight.
This is one of the best articles that I have seen in quite awhile. It explains light therapy in a logical easy to follow language and format. As with any article, we have some differences of opinion. For example, sitting next to a sunny window does suffice as “therapy” for most individuals.
I just had a very informative call from a woman ordering a Feel Bright Light Visor. She had already owned one and it got thrown away – yikes!
During our conversation, she told me that she has bipolar disorder. She used to own a large white light box, and if she felt down, she would often abuse it by leaving it on all day. It gave her energy, but abusing it that way also made it so that she couldn’t sleep. She discovered the bright light hat visor and said that she LOVES it. She said between the hands-free use that lets her do other things while she is getting her therapy, and the fact that it has a timer that shuts the unit off automatically, she loves how easy it is to use and finds it “hugely beneficial”. She also said that during hospitalizations in her past, white light therapy has been prescribed, but for her, the blue/green light of the Feel Bright Light Visor is much more effective. She also told me that she is always happy to share information if she thinks that she can help others. What a great call!
Thank you.
Sarah
Yale’s Paul Desan has designed a new light box to treat Seasonable Affective Disorder. A recent study found a narrow spectrum of light helps treat SAD symptoms, and because his low-powered LED device emits light in that specific spectrum, Desan hopes this will be the first FDA-approved treatment for SAD.
I just wanted to share this amazing and short video with everyone. It is short but breath-taking.
Settle in, turn off the phone and breathe through this amazing show of birds in nature!
Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.
Some good advice on dealing with SAD from Vail, CO. Apparently people are still feeling SAD in the spring in Vail. There is a lot of rain and they are still getting snow.
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Light therapy may improve symptoms in pregnant women with depression, suggests a new study of 27 women in Switzerland.
While the study was small, the findings are promising for doctors who have been hesitant to treat with antidepressants out of fear that the drugs might harm the fetus.
On the other hand, some worry that untreated depression during pregnancy could also lead to birth complications, said Dr. C. Neill Epperson, who heads the Penn Center for Women’s Behavioral Wellness in Philadelphia and was not involved in the current study.
“A lot of people feel like they’re in between a rock and a hard place,” she told Reuters Health.
About one in 10 pregnant women are depressed, note the authors of the current study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, and that puts them at higher risk of preterm delivery and having a baby with low birthweight.
Light therapy has shown success in people with seasonal affective disorder who generally get depressed during the winter when there’s less sunlight than at other times of year. Early findings have suggested the treatment might help people with non-seasonal depression as well.
To see if those findings hold up in pregnant women, Anna Wirz-Justice of the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland and her colleagues randomly assigned 46 depressed women to treatment with either a bright fluorescent light or a non-therapeutic dim red light, the placebo group.
Women were told to sit under the light for an hour each day, starting within a few minutes of waking up. The study lasted for 5 weeks, with participants coming in regularly to meet with researchers who evaluated their depression.
Nineteen women either quit treatment in the middle of the study or were not included in the final results because they started taking antidepressants during the trial, leaving 27 women to be analyzed.
By the end of 5 weeks, 13 out of 16 women receiving light therapy had at least a 50 percent improvement in their symptoms, and 11 were no longer depressed. That compared to five out of 11 women in the placebo group who had a 50 percent or greater improvement and four who stopped being depressed.
The light therapy had no side effects — as Wirz-Justice told Reuters Health, “It’s like going outside for an hour a day” but without the risks associated with UV light.
She expected that women would keep benefiting from more than 5 weeks of treatment with light therapy, and added that the treatment could be used throughout pregnancy and after the baby is born — a time when depression is especially common.
Wirz-Justice also said that the response to light therapy was as good as what has been found in treatment with antidepressant drugs. That makes sense because the light acts on pathways in the brain in the same way that antidepressants do, she said.
But taking an hour of the day to devote to treatment isn’t necessarily feasible for all women.
Light therapy and other non-drug treatments “do have their downfall,” Epperson said. “You have to be really motivated to do light therapy.”
However, she added, “physicians would feel a lot better if they thought that there were (non-medication) strategies that potentially help their patients get better. Light therapy is certainly a very reasonable option.”
Therapeutic lights typically cost around $200, according to Epperson, and last years. By comparison, antidepressants can be bought for about $20 per month.
Future studies are underway to confirm the effectiveness of light therapy in other groups of pregnant women with depression, Wirz-Justice said.
Epperson said that recent research has made it clear that women who are depressed and pregnant should not just try to “slog their way through” without treatment.
“If you feel that your depression is affecting your ability to enjoy your life, enjoy being pregnant … that’s not a good level of depression to live with,” Epperson said. “People have to take that very seriously.”
SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, online April 5, 2011.
UPDATE: FOX News picked up the story with a bit more detail.
What do we do? / One possible solution
Kristena Kons, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, conducted a study on light therapy and its effectiveness in helping military shift workers reduce fatigue. At the time, Kons was an undergraduate researcher at Weber State University in OGDEN, Utah. Kons’ work focused on whether light therapy can affect a person’s secretion of melatonin, a hormone that helps people sleep. Drawing on external cues such as daylight, the body typically begins producing melatonin every night around 9 p.m., and stops secreting the hormone each morning. Shift work, in which work schedules constantly fluctuate between day and swing shifts, disrupt the body’s natural circadian rhythms—behavioral and physiological functions associated with the earth’s 24-hour rotation.
As part of her research, Kons met with 13 military air traffic and weapons controllers working rapidly rotating shift-work schedules at Hill Air Force Base also in Ogden, Utah. Each participant was exposed to light therapy at the beginning of his or her morning/day shift and again at the end of his or her swing shift. Fatigue measurements were taken before and after the administration of light treatment. Kons used salivary melatonin samples and a computerized cognitive task developed by the military (SynWin) to measure physiological and cognitive fatigue. Her research found that light therapy significantly suppressed melatonin levels during swing shifts, delaying individuals’ melatonin circadian rhythms.
The light therapy device used in the study was the Feel Bright Light Hat Visor. These findings suggest that using portable light therapy devices during swing and night shifts in military settings would decrease fatigue-related errors among military or law enforcement personnel.
Hi Light Therapy,
Just a note, I’ve had sleep disorders (sleep apnea, I also wear a Cpap every night), and my own diagnosis of SAD for YEARS AND YEARS. I’ve known a little about full spectrum lights for about fifteen years or so, but I didn’t quite know what to believe about it. I’ve known about light box’s for about eight or ten years and again didn’t research or do anything about it, until my sister in laws brother who has SAD and has had a light box for about seven years. He told me that he loves it (he lives in Alaska) and uses it every day. My problems got so bad that in September of 2010, I have been seeing my doctor and a sleep disorder doctor, and a therapist on a steady basis trying to figure out why I was hitting the bottom of the well. My working with my primary care doctor goes way back concerning a multitude of symptoms, one being eyes that felt like there was ten lbs of sand in each one, no energy, constantly tired, ect. ect. I mentioned to him about SAD and he really didn’t seem to care going in that direction. We’ve tried to see about depression (of which I know now I have and I believe it’s from a combination of SAD and my sleep disorder) about seven years ago with anti-depression medication that didn’t do anything. We tried it again starting last September, again with no good results. I finally started researching on the computer about SAD on the Mayo clinic web site and also found Light therapy of Stillwater (I live in Minnesota). I had been using a incandescent white light bulb as an experiment for about a year off and on, and recently a lot more. I seem to notice some improvement with it. I finally decided after finding the Light Therapy web site to FINALLY give it a try. I talked to one of the owners, Sarah, and she was a big help. After discussing what my needs were and her recommendation, I purchased the “Sunsation Light box with the floor stand”. I have used it for only two and a half weeks. My eyes don’t feel like they’re full of sand any more (first time in years) and my energy level is getting more and more every day and I’m not as tired. After purchasing this I found your website and that I also went on Sun Box website who were the manufacturers of this, and they also had very valuable information attached to it. I just wanted you to know that in less than two weeks your light box has started to change my life immensely. Something that the “miracle of pills” has never done. I can’t wait till I get about two months of use under my belt. I will let you know more then.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!!
I have become one of your greatest salesman, telling a lot of people about it, and discovering that there are a lot of people with this problem. I do feel that most everybody in the Northern climes has SAD, but at different levels of which mine was extremely bad. I feel that I will even use it in the summer before I go to work, as it’s just getting light and there are no windows in the room I work.
Thank you,
S C
