Staring at a red light for 3 minutes improves eyesight, suggests pilot study
People over 40 can improve aspects of their eyesight with a quick blast of light, according to a new study from British researchers.
Professor Glen Jeffery, a professor of neuroscience at the Institute of Ophthalmology at the University College London, and his team found that shining a red LED light into people’s eyes led to “significant improvements” in two areas of sight for people older than 40. That’s the age when the retina, the eye’s “visual information” center, weakens.
“In evolutionary terms, people weren’t supposed to live beyond 40,” Jeffrey tells Yahoo Life. “So the retina starts to suffer because its mitochondria — the battery — runs down.”
Initial study subjects were fruit flies, bumblebees and mice, and they all experienced improved vision using the red light. Then, 24 healthy people between the ages of 28 and 72 were asked to shine a handheld red light with 670 nanometers into their dominant eye (the one that better communicates visual information to the brain) for three minutes daily over two weeks.
When subjects returned to the lab for testing, they showed up to a 20 percent improvement in their ability to detect colors, especially blue, a shade that some have trouble noting with age. And rod function — how well people see dim light — “also improved significantly,” but less so. People younger than 38, the age cutoff researchers established to distinguish young and old subjects, experienced no change in these two visual components.
According to Jeffrey, the sample size of the pilot study published in the Journals of Gerontology was limited because older subjects had difficulty sitting for an initial portion of the study that required their pupils to be dilated and then remain in the dark. “My biggest problem was keeping them awake,” he tells Yahoo Life.
Raj Maturi, MD, a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology who was not involved with the study, cautions that the findings don’t suggest the red light can simply improve overall vision. And the small sample size is a concern, he notes. “Just one or two patients [reporting different results] would have made these averages not as significant.”
However, the work could be useful to the field of photobiomodulation (using light therapy to improve health), which NASA says could have potential to restore the bodies of astronauts returning from space after being exposed to long-term weightlessness.
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