Laser therapy could be used to treat a range of brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, researchers revealed last night.
According to a joint discovery by Swedish and Polish scientists, laser light can be used to identify clumps of diseased proteins in the brain, known as amyloids.
The researchers say this could lead to treatments aimed at destroying the diseased clumps.
Their favoured treatment is photo-acoustic therapy, which might destroy the disease without drugs or surgery having to be used.
Researcher Piotr Hanczyc, of Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, said: “Nobody has talked about using only light to treat these diseases until now.
"This is a totally new approach and we believe that this might become a breakthrough in the research of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
"We have found a totally new way of discovering these structures using just laser light."
The findings were revealed last night in Nature Photonics.
The researchers say that multi-photon laser can reveal the clumps – allowing treatment to be targeted to destroy them.
Multi-photon Absorption in Amyloid Protein Fibres. Nature Photonics 3 November 2013
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