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Shedding Light on Alzheimer’s Disease

UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Madison Browne gives a three-minute talk at the 2023 UC Grad Slam on how light could help treat Alzheimer's disease. Madison Browne, @BerkeleyNews 💡 For more info on Grad Slam: https://gradslam.universityofcalifornia.edu/ Grad Slam challenges UC master's and Ph.D. students to communicate their research in terms that will engage and excite a general audience — and do it in just three minutes! The contest offers the public a window into the amazing work UC grad students are up to, while giving students training to clearly communicate their work.

University of California

10 months ago
Have you heard that light may help treat Alzheimer's disease? Here's how it works. A healthy brain takes in information, like hearing me speak, and processes it so that you can understand what I'm saying. It's all about electricity. All information is electrically transmitted within the brain via specialized cells called neurons, shown here as blue dots. They talk to each other within a network, and a specific group of these neurons are involved in helping us remember. They do this by communicat
ing with each other, using 40 electrical pulses per second. But in people with Alzheimer's, that timing is off. Some researchers at MIT ran a study exposing mice to a special type of light. This light source also pulses 40 times per second, but it appears like a strobe light. They found that the strobing light reduced the pathology of Alzheimer's in mice. This means that strobing lights could offer a non-invasive treatment for people with Alzheimer's, but the problem is patients would have to be
exposed to a strobe light. Could you imagine living like that? So how can we solve this problem? I collaborated with a group of physicists who developed a new light that gets rid of the strobe problem. This light appears like a regular room light, but operates like a strobe light. My job was to test it on mice in a lab to see whether it reduces the effect of Alzheimer's. I took mice expressing an Alzheimer's gene and broke them into three groups. For an hour a day, the control group, shown here
on top, was exposed to regular lighting, the second to strobe, and the third to our new non-strobing light. After a month, I tested the animal's memory. I placed them in a pool of water and trained them to use visual signs in a room to remember where to find an escape platform, shown here in orange. After a week of this training, I saw that mice in the control group were still having difficulty finding the platform. But the mice exposed to strobe and the ones exposed to non-strobing light took
significantly less time to escape. This means that our light seems to slow down the loss of memory. When I examined the brains of these mice, I saw that the control animals have substantial buildup of the plaque that leads to memory loss. But there was slightly less plaque in the mice exposed to strobe and non-strobing light. This suggests that our light may reduce the pathology of Alzheimer's. My findings support that our non-strobing light therapy could offer a treatment for people with Alzhei
mer's. And the company I collaborate with is already running human trials. There is still a lot of work to be done, but eventually, these new lights can be placed in nursing homes as a therapy. So, although researchers have been shooting in the dark to treat Alzheimer's for many years, turns out maybe all we needed was light. Thank you.

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