Recently, neuroscientists at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of West Virginia School of Medicine have discovered that nighttime white light (usually used to illuminate the ward) is associated with inflammation, brain cell death, and high mortality in heart disease patients. Association.
The research team first reconstructed the cardiac arrest with an animal model, allowing the three groups to spend the night in dim red light, dim white light, and darkness. After 7 nights, the researchers assessed their health.
The results showed that nighttime exposure to white light resulted in a variety of adverse outcomes: a group of subjects exposed to white light at night had an increased mortality rate, and there was no difference in mortality between exposure to the red light group and the group in the dark. Researchers believe that nighttime exposure to white light can affect the hippocampus (the part of the brain that plays a key role in memory formation) and cause a more intense inflammatory response.
The results show that changing the color of the night light, from broad-spectrum white to red or turning off the light, is conducive to the prognosis of heart disease. Since the current research results are derived from animals, future studies can demonstrate that this conclusion is equally applicable to the clinical population and will contribute to the rehabilitation of hospitalized cardiac arrest patients.
The research was published in Experimental Neurology.
