Lasers could potentially cure Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

Scientists have discovered that photo acoustic therapy might be the long-awaited cure for brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or the mad cow disease.

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the Polish Wroclaw University of Technology found that it is possible to distinguish aggregations of the proteins, believed to cause the diseases, from the well-functioning proteins in the body by using multi-photon laser technique.

One of the researchers, Piotr Hanczyc, said that nobody has talked about using only light to treat these diseases until now.

"This is a totally new approach and we believe that this might become a breakthrough in the research of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. We have found a totally new way of discovering these structures using just laser light," Hanczyc said.

If the protein aggregates are removed, the disease is in principle cured. The problem until now has been to detect and remove the aggregates.

The researchers now harbor high hopes that photo acoustic therapy, which is already used for tomography, may be used to remove the malfunctioning proteins.

The study is published in the journal Nature Photonics.