What color of LED Lights help with headaches? Experts are found that when people are exposed to green light, their headaches disappear quickly. Greenlight is the only color that doesn’t worsen the headache; people are less turned off by it. Here we will talk about how green LED light color help with headache.
What color of LED Lights help with headaches?
Photophobia, or sensitivity to light, is a common sign of migraine headaches, which affect about 15% of the world’s population.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School have found that exposing people with migraines or headaches to a narrow band of green light makes them less afraid of light and can make their headaches less painful. The study was written up in Brain on May 17.
The study’s lead author said, “Photophobia is not usually as incapacitating as headache pain itself, but being unable to tolerate light can be disabling.” Burstein is also the lead author of the study.
“Light sensitivity is linked to and makes more than 80% of migraine attacks worse,” said Burstein.
Five years ago, Burstein and some of his colleagues discovered that blind migraine sufferers are hurt by blue light. This led to the idea that blocking blue light could help people with migraines who are overly sensitive to light.
Because the people in the first study were blind and couldn’t see all colors of light, experts devised a way to study how different light colours affect headaches in people who could see.
In the current study, Burstein and his colleagues found that a narrow band of green light makes migraines much less bad than any other color of light and that at low intensities, green light can even make headaches less painful. Of the 69 people who took part, 41 finished the study.
“These results give real hope to people with migraines and point researchers and doctors in a good direction for the future.” —Rami Burstein.
Researchers asked people with severe migraines if their pain changed when exposed to different blue, green, yellow, and red light levels.
When there was a lot of light, like in a well-lit office, nearly 80% of patients said all colors except green made their headaches worse. Researchers were surprised that green light even cut pain by about 20%.
Burstein and his colleagues experimented to determine why green light makes migraine sufferers feel less pain. They measured the strong electrical signals that the retina (in the eye) and the cortex (in the brain) sent in response to each light colour. They found that blue and red lights sent the strongest signals to the retina and the cortex, while green lights sent the weakest signals.
Next, they used techniques that had just been made by Rodrigo Noseda, an HMS assistant professor of anaesthesia at Beth Israel Deaconess, to study neurons in the thalamus. This part of the brain sends information about light from the eye to the cortex. These neurons were found to be most sensitive to blue light and least sensitive to green light. This explains why green light helps the brain of someone with a migraine.
Burstein said, “These results give real hope to people with migraines and point to a promising way forward for researchers and clinicians.”
Burstein is now working on making a cheaper light bulb that gives off low-intensity “pure” (narrow-band wavelength) green light and cheaper sunglasses that block all light except this narrow band of pure green light.
Currently, the price of one of these light bulbs is too high, and the only way to block all light except pure green light in sunglasses is through light microscopy, which is also very expensive.
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