In Spain, more than 3.5 million people live with migraine, and almost a million suffer from headaches 15 days a month. One of the characteristic symptoms of migraines, apart from pain, nausea and even vomiting, is photophobia or extreme sensitivity to light, but according to research carried out by experts from Harvard Medical School, in the United States, it can also become in an ally , as told in the specialized publication Brain .
Five years ago, the group of researchers led by Rami Burnstein, director of the Comprehensive Headache Center (belonging to Harvard Medical School), already observed a surprising phenomenon: that blue light aggravated symptoms in blind patients. In this way, they began to study how the different ranges of luminosity affected those affected without visual impairment.
Thus they discovered that people exposed to a very specific type of light, light green, had less painful migraines than the rest . And not only that, but, at low intensities, it significantly relieved their headaches, something that scientists did not expect. Then they verified that the electrical signals generated in the retina and the cerebral cortex by the red and blue lights were significantly more intense than those triggered by the green ones.
Next, Burnstein and his team conducted experiments on animals to see how their neurons in the thalamus (the area of the brain responsible for transmitting information from the eye to the cortex) would react to different colors. And sure enough, the light green light excited them much less than the blue one . The next step is to develop a light bulb that only emits that hue or glasses that block the entire color spectrum except the narrow strip with analgesic properties in migraine patients, solutions that are currently expensive with current technology.
