Roger Seheult, MD of MedCram examines photobiomodulation devices and research, including long COVID. See all Dr. Seheult’s videos at: https://www.medcram.com/
(This video was recorded on March 18th, 2024)
Roger Seheult, MD is the co-founder and lead professor at https://www.medcram.com/
He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine.
LINKS / REFERENCES:
Photobiomodulation (PBM) research – a comprehensive database (Heiskanen) | https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZKl5Me4XwPj4YgJCBes3VSCJjiVO4XI0tIR0rbMBj08/edit#gid=0
Photobiomodulation Therapy as a Possible New Approach in COVID-19: A Systematic Review (MDPI) | https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/11/6/580
Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body (Melatonin Research) | https://www.melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view/19/213
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 65: COVID-19 and Oxidative Stress (MedCram) | https://youtu.be/gzx8LH4Fjic?si=17smoyNED8TcPadd
Severe Glutathione Deficiency, Oxidative Stress and Oxidant Damage in Adults Hospitalized with COVID-19: Implications for GlyNAC (Glycine and N-Acetylcysteine) Supplementation (MDPI) | https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3921/11/1/50
Sunlight: Optimize Health and Immunity (MedCram) | https://youtu.be/5YV_iKnzDRg?si=Qsm24a83hIYuT7Wq
The Case for Sunlight in COVID 19 Patients: Oxidative Stress (MedCram) | https://youtu.be/2Zzo4SJopcY?si=WINbKikQtwnZcS5j
Case Study: Sunlight Treatment for Hospitalized COVID Patient – Outcome and Implications (MedCram) | https://youtu.be/eCSe4af9Wmk?si=GrvBePwgh-vvKQNj
Near Infrared Light (940nm) Improves COVID Outcomes: Exciting Randomized Control Trial (MedCram) | https://youtu.be/ZdiUnmpOgqE?si=hGTZ7FW356fwUHwE
Photobiomodulation (ASLMS) | https://www.aslms.org/for-the-public/treatments-using-lasers-and-energy-based-devices/photobiomodulation
A 57-Year-Old African American Man with Severe COVID-19 Pneumonia Who Responded to Supportive Photobiomodulation Therapy (PBMT): First Use of PBMT in COVID-19 (American journal of case reports) | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7449510/
Adjunct low level laser therapy (LLLT) in a morbidly obese patient with severe COVID-19 pneumonia: A case report (Canadian journal of respiratory therapy) | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7521601/
Effect of Transcranial Low-Level Light Therapy vs Sham Therapy Among Patients With Moderate Traumatic Brain Injury (JAMA) | https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2770551
Post-COVID cognitive deficits at one year are global and associated with elevated brain injury markers and grey matter volume reduction: national prospective study (Research Square) | https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3818580/v1
Use of either transcranial or whole-body photobiomodulation treatments improves COVID-19 brain fog (Journal of Biophotonics) | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbio.202200391
Transcranial photobiomodulation for the brain: a wide range of clinical applications (Neural regeneration research) | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10581558/
Biphasic Dose Response in Low Level Light Therapy (Dose-response) | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2790317/
Pulsed transcranial photobiomodulation generates distinct beneficial neurocognitive effects compared with continuous wave transcranial light (Lasers in medical science) | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37668791/
Neuronic (Neuronic) | https://neuronic.online
Vielight (Vielight) | https://www.vielight.com
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#covid19 #infraredlight #coronavirus
Meg.com welcome to another megr video we’ve talked a lot about sunlight and how the benefits of sunlight can impact the human body but there is another area of science which is growing very quickly termed photobiomodulation which is the use of light in health and we’re going to talk
About that today we’re going to talk about some of the devices that are being used specifically for brain brain photobiomodulation and the potential that these could have on long covid this slide that we’re starting out with shows a photobiomodulation therapy device and a summary of all the things that can
Happen the modulation of hormones increasing maccrage activity decreasing pro-inflammatory cyto kindes modulation of the Adaptive immune system and then there’s some other issues like antimicrobial effects cytoprotective effects antiviral effects cytotoxic molecule rupturing the microbial membrane we have blood vessels and specific cellular functions and injured lung tissue cell signaling all of these
Things are involved with photobiomodulation and specifically what I wanted to show you is this slide here which is a search of the photobiomodulation articles that have been published going back to 1980 the knowledge and the amount of information that we’re getting in this particular field of study is growing exponentially
These are the total number of studies accumulated for the year and for me this has been an evolution in my understanding and thinking about light therapy and how light can affect the human body we’ve talked about circadian rhythm and depression and these are things that have been welln but we’re
Now delving into areas that are not wellknown and are amazing in terms of the Frontiers that we’re learning about this is an emerging field for those people that really want to know how to improve health and some of the treatments that are coming down and some
Of the possible devices this is going to be a good video so I’m going to use covid-19 as a prototype for exactly what the benefits of near infrared light photobiomodulation can actually have this goes way back to a video that we published on our channel in April of
2020 and it’s this understanding that the ace2 receptor and its loss because of covid-19 infection can perate the balance between oxidative molecules and reducing molecules causing an exacerbation in reactive oxygen species and therefore blood clots and hypoxemia we actually showed that covid-19 increases the amount of Von willbrand factors secreted into the bloodstream
Which causes those clots and you get the happy hypoxics that we talked about one of the things that is well known to mitigate reactive oxygen species is melatonin and very early on we talked about about the importance of sleep and its effect on the immune system and also on oxidative
Stress the findings of oxidative stress in covid-19 is well documented this was a paper that was published back in December of 2021 showing that in patients admitted to the hospital with covid-19 they had a reduction in antioxidants in the cell they had an increase in the marker of oxidative
Stress and also in the marker of oxidative damage and they showed that very clearly here for instance this was a measure of oxidative damage and you can see across all of the different years that in those that had covid there were higher levels of oxidative stress
In the cell and specifically as a result of mitochondria and this mitochondrial dysfunction has come to the surface as the major way that people develop long Co you can see here a tweet from Eric toppel who’s been following this and other articles here mitochondria and microbi dysfunction in covid-19
Pathogenesis here’s another article that was published in science translational medicine in late August of 2023 core mitochondrial genes are downregulated during SARS K2 infection of rodent and human hosts another one here a study identifies mitochondrial dysfunction as the cause of long covid fatigue and so here we have the intersection of
Photobiomodulation exerts its greatest effects also the intersection of the cause of one of the newest disabling diagnoses that we’ve had in the last four years which is long covid this paper was published before the covid pandemic hit back in 2019 it was published in melatonin research and
It was in this article that I first began to understand what was going on with photobiomodulation and the effect of natural sunlight which contains a lot of infrared radiation had on the mitochondria and the ability of near infrared light to penetrate deep inside the body going back to our Paradigm you
Can see here very clearly that melatonin secreted from the pineal gland could be a mitigating Factor against excessive reactive oxygen species in covid-19 patients and in SARS cov2 infected cells but what became apparent to me is that melatonin from the sun which is produced on site in the mitochondria could also
Have a benefit of that the fact that sunlight itself through near infrared radiation could have a benefit in addition to obviously ultraviolet radiation producing vitamin D in the skin this was something that I think was a paradigm shift and we produced at least three videos over the next year the first one
Was in January of 22 where we published light as medicine over 4 million views now on that video also the case for sunlight in Co just a few days later in January 26th of 20122 and finally when the randomized control trial using near infrared light in covid-19 from a group
In Brazil was published in a prestigious Journal we published that about a year later on January 2nd 2023 which showed that 940 nanom of infrared radiation for 15 minutes a day 7 days in a row could actually improve outcomes in covid-19 in the hospital specifically length of stay
And also pulmonary function testing and hematological testing and of course with that my practice changed and added the ability for covid patients to get sunlight and we discussed that with a case where we took a patient outside who had Co severe enough to require high
Flow oxygen at 100% 35 lers and we were able to get them outside in the sunlight for about 15 minutes a day every day and we actually published that finding in our video that was published on December 6 2023 sunlight for hospitalized covid many have written me over the last
Couple of years in my advocacy of getting outside and getting sunlight that you live either in areas where that doesn’t happen or the sun doesn’t come up early enough and you’re not able to get it or you’re just not able to get outside and so there have been many
Requests and there have been many projects I can see in replies to making their own devices that have near infrared radiation not every single day of the week is bright and sunny sometimes you have overcast clouds and you can’t get out into the Sun and one of the things that we’ve noted and
Talked about is that near infrared radiation is blocked by water vapor because water absorbs in the near infrared Spectrum specifically at actually around 940 NM as well as other areas what this causes of course is our human tendency to see if we can package and artificially produce something in
Nature first of all I’ll just say here at this point in Venture that I still believe 100% that the absolute best way to take advantage of these mechanisms is to get outside and get natural sunlight and that is the best way to do it and it’s absolutely free that being said
There are situations where patients can’t get outside it’s too cold it’s not enough sun it’s too dark they’re not able to physically patients are in the hospital they’re too critically ill they can’t be disconnected from the hospital there are so many reasons why this could happen and so people have looked into
This area of photobiomodulation photo meaning light bio meaning living cells and modulation meaning an exertion influence on what photobiomodulation is specifically is describing the biochemical reactions that occur in living cells in response to light for some of us watching this video this may be news to us except for
Perhaps the retina of the eye we’re not aware of any way in which sunlight or light affects the human body and what we’re going to find out is that is not true light does affect the human body in profound ways and in ways that we’re just starting to understand so just to
Be clear about this historically when you’re looking up scientific articles you’re going to see this term photobiomodulation used in its alternate terms specifically in bio stimulation cold or cool laser lowlevel laser therapy soft laser and low power laser therapy and these are all terms that have been used in the past fortunately
In 2015 thanks to Dr Prine areni photo bio modulation therapy was actually added to the National Library of Medicine mesh database entry terms and so these things will be easier to find for the most part if you want to understand a little bit more about the
Definition this is how they would say it in this therapy a light source is placed near or in contact with the skin allowing the light energy or photons to penetrate tissue where it interacts with chromophores located in cells resulting in photo physical and photochemical changes that lead to alterations at the
Molecular cellular and tissue levels of the body light induces a complex chain of physiological reactions in diseased and damaged tissues to accelerate wound healing and tissue regeneration increase circulation reduce acute inflammation reduce acute and chronic pain and help restore normal cellular function interestingly recent Research indicates that light can enhance performance in
Normal tissues and cells as well and so this has been a very hot area of research and as you can see based on this graph the number of articles that are coming out are increasing and probably the number of indications and devices will be increasing as well so in
My search for understanding about photob biom modul ation I came across this database which I’ll make available to you in the link in the description below this spreadsheet was put together by a scientist involved in photobiomodulation who’s living in Finland he’s also a dentist his name is Vladimir hekinan
Quite an amazing spreadsheet that he’s put together with over 7,000 different research studies that are categorized based on the part of the body the type of trial and the outcomes of course this is a searchable database and so for those of you who are really interested and hardcore in looking at
Photobiomodulation I highly recommend this link it is updated and you can find a lot of the information on here in this database you can find studies like this and case reports for instance like this a 57-year-old African-American man with severe covid-19 pneumonia who responded to supportive biomodulation therapy first
Use of pbmt in covid-19 the wavelengths that were used here was 88 and 905 nanometers and it was published here in this article another one here that you see if you look over here on the right side of the screen the adjunct low-level laser therapy in morbidly obese patient
With severe covid-19 pneumonia another case report again at 808 and 95 nanometers you can see there the name for this therapy has actually changed from pbmt to L llt and that’s another reason why there really needs to be standardization of this type of therapy in order for it to be searched but this
Database doesn’t only include case studies but also randomized control trials as well here’s a paper that was published in September of 2020 on the jamond network and this was a randomized clinical trial and it was looking at traumatic brain injury patients to see whether or not photobiomodulation would
Improve outcomes there and here they used a postconcussion symptoms questionnaire and the questionnaire ranked symptoms and so the higher the number the worse the score was this one specifically is the rpq 13 and the authors of this study made their own device their own helmet which emitted
Light at 8810 nanom and it showed that over 6 months period of time there was a statistically significant reduction in the RP Q13 assessment now again this is traumatic brain injury not in covid-19 patients not brain fog or postco patients but this paper postco cognitive deficits at one year are Global and associated
With elevated brain injury markers and gry matter volume reduction a national prospective study in this study they took 351 previously healthy but hospitalized long covid subjects and they match each one of them to at least eight or more match controls matched for age sex first language and level of
Education and they assessed them 1 to 26 months post discharge to see how they were and what they found was that that these postco patients had lower cognitive scores and it did not correlate with covid-19 severity and that recovery took months and was incomplete as you can see over here in
The graphs the normative graph here is on the left the middle one that’s in red are the covid patients and then the long covid patients here you can see in multicolors things like the neurofilament light chain or NFL and the gal fibrillary acidic protein or the gfap here you can see where were
Elevated and were indicative of brain injury things like too which actually looks at cognitive impairment was statistically significantly elevated as well compared to the normative control groups and so what we see here in terms of long Co and brain fog is that it’s not too dissimilar to what we are seeing
In traumatic brain injury last year we published a video on our Channel treatment for long Co and we looked at at photobiomodulation and sunlight but specifically we looked at this study looking at a device that was a helmet that transmits at 170 nanom and the question that they were asking was
Can we get the same effects in the human body by just doing helmets as we do with whole body photobiomodulation and I guess the question might be why would we expect the radience of near infrared light into the brain by wearing a helmet help well first of all we’ve Ted talked about that
Near infrared light is able to penetrate through the scalp through the bone through the cable spinal fluid which then diffuses it throughout the surface of the brain and then the crevices conduct that light deep down into the surface of the brain where the gray matter is here’s a paper that was
Actually just published at the time of our production of this video which is March of 2024 showing the trans cranial photobiomodulation for the brain and its wide range of clinical applications you can see here over on the right hand side of the screen a number of the different applications that they’re talking about
For instance angiogenesis anti- apotosis cell migration neuron growth etc etc here’s neurogenesis even lymphatic drainage which is important in things like dementia so one of the questions is why would near infrared light help well there’s been a number of theories that have looked at this and it has to do
With the mitochondria that in the neurons and the fact that the mitochondria is where energy production occurs and that there’s two ways of energy production there is oxidative phosphorilation and then there is glycolysis and it’s interesting because a lot of the effects that are considered to be relevant here is there are
Proteins in the electron transport chain specifically cytochrome C oxidase which can interact with light and cause changes there’s also other theories that near infrared light also stimulates melatonin production and reduces oxidative stress and also that near infrared light makes the water around the ftpa where energy production occurs less viscous and therefore more
Effective and efficient but let’s read what this article that was just published this month shows here quote the activation of mitochondrial metabolism by photobiomodulation can be characterized as a switch towards oxidative phosphorilation and away from glycolysis this switch has two important consequences firstly stem cells living in their hypoxic Niche mainly rely on
Glycolysis for their energy requirements however when their mitochondria are activated by PBM or photobiomodulation they must leave their Niche to go in search of sufficient oxygen to support oxidative phosphorilation once outside the niche the stem cells become progenitor cells and can be influenced by any cues that might be released from
Areas of tissue damage in order to differentiate into sematic cells where they can then repair the brain so basically what it’s saying here is this light signals these progenitor cells these stem cells if you will to go out and start actually replacing the damaged cells that were there
Before this is a helmet that is made by the company neuronic and this is known as the neur radiant 1070 because it puts out light at 1070 nanm they did a head-to-head trial against the entire bed which is whole body photobiomodulation which puts out two different frequencies one at 660 and the
Other at 850 and what they wanted to do was to actually test out objectively to see whether or not you needed to have a helmet or a whole bed tissue radiation so what they looked at here is the data from these objective data sets and in the first half you’re looking at trans
Cranial and in the second half you’re looking at whole body and you can see that the Improvement in the cognition score was the same name here again you’re looking at trans cranial and the Improvement there in the digital symbol substitution test and you’re looking at
Whole body here as well and it was about the same in terms of improvements in patients who had these cognitive assessments and this led the authors to the conclusion that you could get the same effects with the helmet that you would get with whole body radiation of
Infrared light and if you want more information on that please watch our video and we’ll put a link in the description below one of the things that’s also important to understand about photobiomodulation is normally you would expect a dose response curve to be linear so in other words the higher the
Dose the more the effect in fact it’s actually basic so in other words there is a point of maximal impact above which you actually start to see a diminishing impact and that was shown very effectively in this article the basic dose response in lowlevel light therapy or photobiomodulation and so these things
Need to be carefully thought out and there needs to be Advanced planning in terms of magnitude of the light therapy the other aspect of photobiomodulation is this idea that pulsed light can actually generate distinct and beneficial neurocognitive effects this was a paper that was published in 2023 and they looked at
Three different groups at 660 nanm 8 50 nanm over 8 minutes and they had those that were a control group those that had continuous wave and those that were pulsed meaning that there was different frequencies 40 HZ and 100 HZ to see whether or not there would be an
Improvement what they notice is that when they pulsed the wave they had actually better scores in terms of the Sleep score the cych motor vigilance tasks and delayed match to sample scores that were actually improved and the average power within the gamma band which is another way of measuring
Cognitive ability and so this is something else that scientists have Incorporated in photobiomodulation therapy is the fact that they can be pulsed I want to say up front that I have no Financial relationship with either neuronic or vlight neither company is paying me to feature any of
Their devices in my video I’m just doing this because there has been a tremendous demand to comment on what’s going on in terms of devices in terms of long covid and other diseases that have potentially photobiomodulation as a treatment so let me just tell you a little bit about what
The current state of affairs are in terms of photobiomodulation helmets their use in Alzheimer’s disease brain injury depression anxiety long covid etc etc and right now there are no devices that are FDA approved the two major companies are neuronic which you see here and also one that I’ll show you in
A little bit called vlight here you can see on the neuronic website under research the different diseases and some of the research that neuronic was wishing to highlight both neuronic and vlight are trying to get FDA approval for their devices and of course the research that goes into that and the
Time and the effort is quite arduous and my understanding is they could be anywhere from 2 to 3 years before these devices get FDA approval and they will be specific for specific diseases if we look at that long covid category there at the neuronic website you’ll see some
Of the references that they have used and if we look at their device it’s not inexpensive I consider it like a surgeon’s scalpel Just Like a Surgeon scalpel it is a tool that is used but is best used when under the control of someone who is knowledgeable and
Understands what that device can do as I’ll show you here in a little bit this device is not something that you just put on your head and flip a button there is a number of inputs and there are variables that you can input to have the
Desired effect you can see here adding a 3-month consultation in how to use this device is actually going to be very helpful this is the other company vlight and they have a similar appearance but I believe this one is slightly different in that there is a nasal probe as
Well back to the new radiant neuronic did send me a neuro radiant 1070 and they gave that to me for free to try out and I will be sending it back to them after I’m done with it so as you can see here this is simply a helmet that plugs
In in and it’s got light emitting devices on the inside that irradiates the outside of the skull and penetrates through you can put different sized pads on there and you can see as it fits pretty easily on your head however this controller has a number of different
Inputs and this is really where I think the genius of this type of a device has come in is they’ve made it so customizable that if protocols down the line are found for specific types of diseases they can very easily be entered here as you can see there is generalized
Settings like peace focus and energize and these have different settings and pulses and durations but there’s also a customizable program where you can input specifically what part of the helmet is activated and for how long at what intensity and I think this is important in terms of being upfront with them in
Terms of consultation so they have experts who are knowledgeable about the types of settings that they would require for different types of conditions and again that’s why I would say this is very similar to a scalpel so this is a tool that is used and the outcomes will be based on consultation
With the experts that understand and know how this type of a device would be used for your particular situation I did notice on their website that they are starting a clinical trial and that they are looking for people to enter into that clinical trial so they can do further research and submit those
To the FDA for approval these are are some of the eligibility criteria 50 to 75 years of age located in the United States have mild cognitive impairment have a computer and a smartphone have a caregiver or family member willing to help and willing to drive for up to 20
Mil to obtain two EEG tests one at the beginning and one at the end of the study in the sake of equal time here we have vlight and they also have a similar device as we mentioned if we ask on their website whether or not this is FDA
Approved there is a message that comes up saying that no it is not FDA approved the FDA have categorized our devices as lowrisk General Wellness devices in accordance to the fda’s draft on General wellness policy on lowrisk devices dated January 20 2015 all Vite devices have been independently TUV certified as safe
For Consumer use and I believe that is a German or European Standard as this company is based in Europe so I hope this video has been informative you may not have gotten specific information about the conditions that you have but I believe that looking at that Excel
Spreadsheet which we’ll give the link to and understanding more about the condition that you’re specifically concerned about will give you more information in terms of that I will reiterate again I think that photobiomodulation therapy is a type of therapy that is a tool the way that that
Tool is used will determine the outcome when that tool is implemented please don’t forget to join us at medcram.com for all of your continuing medical education needs don’t forget to subscribe turn on notifications we’ll see you next time thanks for joining us
