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As the aging population booms, researchers are racing to find a way of halting the devastating march of Alzheimer’s disease.

While many exciting possibilities have come to an end when treatments unsuccessfully travel from animal test subjects to humans, there’s a new treatment awaiting the big test on the horizon, light therapy.

According to the report at KQED:

The researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory inundated the brains of mice with bright flashing lights at a specific frequency, in order to trigger the nonfunctioning cells that normally clean the plaque to do their job again…

…One of the interesting things about the technique is that it not only worked using the maximally invasive procedure of drilling holes in the mice’s skulls, but also by simply flashing lights into their eyes.

Here’s a closer look:

Full story at KQED.

New frontiers in Alzheimer’s research.