Using a light device may turn out to be a way to combat Alzheimer’s disease, an experimental animal study shows.

It’s known that people with Alzheimer’s disease have a buildup of beta-amyloid plaques in their brain.  Such plaques occur when beta-amyloid, which is a protein in the brain, forms abnormal folds.

A Korean research team decided to find out if a treatment known as phyotodynamic therapy could be used to suppress the formation of such beta-amlyoid plaques.

Such a technique has been used to treat cancer in humans but had never been employed on a degenerative brain disease such as Alzheimer’s.

The researchers used a fruit fly model of to test their hypothesis. They found that using the therapy generated oxygen, which oxidized the plaque and alleviated many of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Treatments with light provide benefits over standard drug treatments because less medication is needed than other drug treatments, and there are fewer side effects, the researchers noted.

They plan further studies to learn if this technique can be used to suppress beta-amyloid creation at an early stage of the disease. If so, this therapy could potentially be used to prevent Alzheimer's disease or halt its progress, they said.