NEW ORLEANS — The U.S. Department of Energy wants to know if changing the light bulbs in your daytime office, can lower your risk of getting some serious chronic illnesses.
So they've asked some local researchers to be a part of a new study to find out.
In 40 years of studies, Dr. David Blask and his team at Tulane, have warned us that exposure to light at night disrupts our circadian rhythm. That is our 24-hour internal clock.
“So the light period in our lives has crept into the dark, and this has had serious consequences on our health,” said Dr. David Blask, a Tulane professor of Structural and Cellular Biology.
He said it increases incidences of cancer, especially breast cancer, a metabolic syndrome that is a sign of prediabetes, obesity, depression, and heart disease.
The natural cycle is to get blue light during the day from daylight, then oranges and red at sunset, then total darkness at night. That signals the body to make an important hormone, melatonin.
“It of course contributes to sleep, but also it's an anti-cancer hormone. It's an anti-inflammatory hormone. It has important positive effects on metabolism.”
They also did animal research, taking out lab florescent lights and putting in blue-enriched LED light bulbs, mimicking daylight. It led to a discovery.
“Showing that blue-enriched led light during the day when that light is present in the animal rooms for our mice or our rats when we looked at their melatonin at night in their blood, we saw a seven-fold increase in the peak level of melatonin,” said Dr. Blask.
Now Dr. Blask is part of a new study. Could these blue lights during the day in buildings contribute to the health of people's metabolism like it did in animals?
“All of those parameters in the rodents in the course of the day improved. Their blood glucose levels were reduced. Insulin levels were reduced. Cortisol was reduced.”
Most buildings have fluorescent lights with all the colors in the spectrum, but in a doctor’s office with blue-enriched LED lights, you could see the difference.
In a year or so we could know if part of your health routine is to change your office light bulbs to blue-enriched ones.
And computers and phones give off blue light, so when used at night, they disrupt the natural cycle too. The doctor says using blue-blocking glasses can help.