Cold Laser Therapy Mechanisum : On the way to a unified theory

I just had  chat with Mike Hamblin (Harvard Medical School). He described to me how he had this insight about Nitric Oxide being unbound from Cytochrome C Oxidase by light after reading an article in Nature about fire flies.

Hypoxic or stressed cells tend to be low in oxygen and high in NO
This NO is bound to to Cytochrome C oxidase and inhibits cell function

Light (at certain wavelengths, intensities and duration)  knocks NO off Cytochrome C oxidase so the cell performs optimally again plus the NO causes a temporary increase in blood flow :-)

Which I guess sets up a virtuous circle because that brings more oxygen and more nutrients to the cell.

This effect lasts a few hours only though he says

Hence more frequent treatments are better (which Lanzafame has confirmed in the lab)

We have known for some time that vasodilatation only occurs at quite low “dosages”  and as the last couple of years work has demonstrated, lower intensity for longer treatment times , applied more frequently gets better tissue healing and anti-inflammatory results in clinical and laboratory trials.

There is SO MUCH mitochondria and it is SO ABSORBENT at the wavelengths we use it will be absorbing most of the light we put in and is really the only mechanism worth focussing on – even though there may be others. It’s also a story most medics can grasp and understand.

It is as near as we can get to a unified theory.

The anti-inflammatory mechanism is incomplete. I asked Rodrigo Lopes Martins (University of Sao Paulo) to explain to me on Skype what molecule absorbs the light and leads to the reduction of PGE2 but he has no idea  We know that 810nm laser “knocks out Cox-2” (Bjordal) but why ? That must be a secondary effect. What is the primary effect ? I’ll assert here that it is probably Cytochrome C Oxidase again, and that the effect on Cox-2 and PGE2 is secondary to that. Can one of you propose the path ?

Part of Robertas work suggest that higher dose laser reduces ATP syntheses in axonal mitochondria which may be the same for all mitochondria would also explain inhibition of tissue repair with the higher intensity lasers. Nice for trigger points, bad for tendons.

Come on – send me your theories

About James Carroll

Founder and CEO at THOR Photomedicine Ltd. About THOR
This entry was posted in PBM/LLLT. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *