Shine a light on depression

Light goes on, depression goes off.

This may sound too good to be true, but a new study finds that simple light therapy might actually be a powerful weapon in the battle against depression.

Light therapy, as you may know, involves staring at a specially focused light for a little while each day. It's already the standard treatment for a form of depression called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD.

And if you've never heard of it, I can understand how this might sound like something out of a New Age magazine rather than a scientific journal.

But the results of a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry speak for themselves.

Researchers assigned 89 patients 60 years old and up to either an hour of light therapy every morning, or an hour in front of a red light (red lights are not believed to have any therapeutic properties).

After three weeks, 43 percent of the light therapy patients showed improvement, compared to 36 percent of the red-light group.

Not impressed, right? But hold on a minute--because while the treatment ended at three weeks, the patients were reevaluated after another three weeks.

And that's where this gets really interesting, because the light therapy patients continued to improve even when they were no longer sitting in front of that glow each day.

By the six-week mark, 54 percent of light-therapy patients improved--while some of those given the red lights actually regressed, with only 33 percent overall showing improvement.

The effects went far beyond "I feel less depressed." The researchers found that light therapy patients were sleeping better, had higher levels of melatonin in the evening, and had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol overall.

Those results put light therapy on par with some of the most powerful depression drugs--but unlike those drugs, light therapy comes with no side effects and minimal costs. Once you buy the machine (usually under $200) the only cost is an occasional light bulb.

And that's just gotta drive Big Pharma bosses nuts... because there's just no way to make a billion dollars selling light bulbs.

But you can bet that one of these days they'll try anyway.

On a mission for your health,

Ed Martin
Editor, House Calls