| Beaming
red light at animals soon after they've drunk methanol partially
protects their eyes against that chemical's blinding effects,
research on rats suggests.
Such light therapy might find applications
in people who accidentally ingest methanol or who suffer from
other forms of acquired blindness, such as age-related macular
degeneration and glaucoma, says Janis T. Eells of the Medical
College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
Strong, red light is high-intensity, low-frequency
radiation. Eells and her colleagues chose to experiment with
such radiation because other studies had shown that it can
protect cells' energy-producing parts, the mitochondria, from
some forms of chemical and metabolic injuries.
Methanol harms sight mainly by damaging mitochondria
in cells in the eye's retina and optic nerve. People and animals
can go blind within 2 days of ingesting methanol, an alcohol
used in windshield-wiper fluid and other solvents.
Eells and her colleagues fed lab rats three
doses of methanol over 2 days and exposed some of the animals
to three periods of intense red light, each lasting almost
2.5 minutes. Cells in the light-treated animals' eyes were
subsequently more responsive to normal light and suffered
less structural damage from the methanol poisoning than eye
cells in animals not treated with light therapy.
The researchers report their findings in an
upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Since mitochondrial damage may play a role
in other sight disorders, light therapy could prove useful
against multiple causes of blindness. It is cautious that
commercially available red lights don't shine with the intensity
that seems necessary to achieve therapeutic effects. |
