Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Light Can Cause Depression
This article discusses research from Johns Hopkins University which found that being exposed to bright lights at night has been shown in mice to cause depressive symptoms. The researchers speculate that bright lights from computer screens, televisions, and even lamps can release cortisol into the body. This stress hormone can lead to altered brain function and ultimately, depression or even cancer! Mice that were subjected to 3.5 hours of light, followed by 3.5 hours of dark. The researchers found that, while this did not influence the sleeping cycles of the mice, it did produce depressive symptoms. Mice that were subjected to the light-treatment were less motivated, less willing to seek pleasure, and less mobile than the control group.
I think this is a very important finding, especially for college students like us. Most of us are constantly up late at night doing schoolwork or even just browsing the internet on computers with lights that could potentially cause us mental harm. On top of that, I know I'm not the only student that has ever had to pull a graveyard shift for a job. The article says that even working in a lighted environment at night could produce the same effects. Unfortunately now that it's getting dark earlier, light at night seems even more unavoidable. We can't all go to sleep when it gets dark at five in the afternoon. The only solution I can think of is to maybe turn off the background lights while watching a movie or using the computer at night. Does anyone else have any ideas of how we can help the "lights at night" problem?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/light-at-night-depression-brain-functioning_n_2132373.html?utm_hp_ref=sleep
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After reading you post above and reading through the article I see how detrimental this light at night problem can be for organisms such as mice. From the article, we can clearly see that the mice did have depressive symptoms set in after exposure to the lights. However, I did see that the mice were subjected to light and dark for 3.5 hour periods. I feel that with this step being part of their experiment, it would be hard to extrapolate the results to humans. Personally, I cannot recall many times where I have been in the dark 3.5 hours and then back to light for 3.5 hours many times in a row. I would be interested to see what the results would be if the researchers could perform a study with human participants who work in light conditions or with computers during the nighttime vs. people who do not receive such exposure. Non the less, still a very interesting article to read.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your comment. I think mice being subjected to light and then dark for 3.5 hour periods is something us humans would rarely experience. They should definitely perform this study on humans and see how we respond to light for a long period of time. They could even perform this study on mice without using the 3.5 hour periods. I did learn something new in this article about humans and mice having similar light-activated cells which was good to know, seeing as though they are using mice for their research.
DeleteIn addition, this article is interesting and I would love to see more research done regarding this subject. It would also be interesting to know how much light we could be exposed to without it being harmful to us, and how much light they exposed the mice to.
This is very interesting, and you're right - it directly applies to us college students. I have one question: Can the 3.5 hours of dark exposure be the same as sleep? I know that sleep involves different brain activity, but technically it is dark when you sleep. I'm wondering if this study considered sleep as darkness. If this is the case, college students could definitely be at risk for depression and cancer like the article suggests. One thing I thought about while reading this post was the idea of "seasonal depression". Once it starts getting darker earlier, people often slip into a slight depression. Do you think that this could be related to the study in that people are actually in more light towards the night if they are indoors more in the winter? I think that would be interesting to look into.
ReplyDeleteThis article was very interesting. I've read articles before about light exposure therapy which is said to brighten moods and help depressive symptoms, but I've never heard that being exposed to certain kinds of light for a period of time could cause depresssive symptoms. I would be interested to find out what would happen if the mice weren't subjected to 3.5 hours of each light and complete darkness but just straight through either for a whole day; I think that would be more beneficial in determining how lightness and darkness affects humans.
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ReplyDeleteI agree, this was a very interesting article. With all of the studies that have been done on light exposure and happiness, it's interesting to see how light may be effecting us in the opposite way. However, I'm not sure how reliable the mice are in this light-dark cycling, and I think this should be studied on humans in order to determine if this is true. We know that watching TV, surfing the web on our laptops, and reading on our iPads late into the night might be bad for our sleep. The article says that past studies did not show that light exposure before a sustained period of darkness effected mice's sleep. So even though the mice show depressive behaviors in this study, how do we know that the opposite can't be true for humans?
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