Bright Light Therapy Might Help In Treating Depression: Study

3/12/98, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES, Young woman receiving light therapy for the ... [+] treatment of depression. (Photo by Najlah Feanny/Corbis via Getty Images)

Major depressive disorder is a debilitating disability that impacts around 5% of adults worldwide. While doctors commonly prescribe antidepressants to patients, it might not benefit everyone and has several side effects. A non-pharmacological solution that could effectively treat depressive disorders could be bright light therapy. Patients with non-seasonal depression who were treated with bright light therapy reported a 40% remission rate, according to a recent study.

“The primary supportive argument in favor of using bright light as an adjunctive treatment is the cost. Even though outpatient treatment costs with antidepressants are widely variable, exposure to external light generally involves no costs or limitations, which reinforces the need to firm bright light therapy as an efficient adjunctive treatment for non-seasonal depressive disorders,” the researchers wrote in their study that was published in JAMA Psychiatry.

Prior studies have shown that light exposure can affect people’s mood and cognitive functioning. Researchers say that happens when bright light enters the inner surface of the retina where neurons called retinal ganglion cells are located. These neurons then transmit visual information from the retina to the brain and also play a role in influencing your brain’s ability to regulate your mood especially because these neurons transmit visual information to brain areas responsible for mood regulation like the amygdala, suprachiasmatic nucleus, and the dorsal raphe nucleus.

To delve deeper into how bright light therapy could help in treating nonseasonal depression, the researchers analyzed the data from studies that included 858 participants who were diagnosed with depressive disorders. The study participants were made to sit in front of a fluorescent light box that produced extremely bright white light at 10,000 lux for at least 30 minutes daily. “Patients treated with bright light therapy had a significantly higher remission rate than the control groups,” the team observed. “These findings suggest that bright light therapy was an effective adjunctive treatment for non-seasonal depressive disorders, and the response time to the initial treatment may be improved with the addition of bright light therapy.”

“Our results do not underscore the need for randomized clinical trials with larger follow-up periods but strengthen the theory that patients treated with bright light therapy acquire remission of symptoms and response rate more rapidly than patients treated only with antidepressants,” the authors added.

For three decades, bright light therapy has been used to treat sleep disorders like sleep phase syndrome, which is characterized by people falling asleep only several hours after midnight and difficulties waking up in the morning.

Bright light therapy works by slowly tweaking and shifting people's sleep patterns. The light boxes are also used to treat seasonal depression in the Global North during winters.

Your healthcare provider must determine the right duration of bright light exposure and the correct light intensity. Studies have found that bright light therapy might work best along with antidepressants.

While these results are encouraging and show the potential of bright light therapy, buying a light box and using it at home might not be that effective. "Some devices advertised as '10,000-lux' devices produced this intensity only at unreasonably close distances, over a restricted field, or with unacceptable glare or unevenness of illumination. Device selection is key to ensuring that patients receive evidence-supported doses of light," researchers wrote in a 2019 study.

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