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Light therapy ? Anyone tried it any advice?

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#1 Thu, 15/05/2014 - 11:28
Wiggs
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Last seen: 8 years 5 months ago
Joined: 26/02/2014 - 15:13

Light therapy ? Anyone tried it any advice?

Hi

not been on this new forum and still getting used to it !!  My son Wiggs (now 12) has Chronic PH which looks like  continuous headache with CH attacks on top.    Indo is very effective.  As the years go on you start to see patterns

One thing that stands out is how much better he is in the summer compared to the winter.  In the summer the background headaches are low level with lower level attacks, winter gives a background headaches so bad that even thinking is hard,  on top of that severe attacks.

Wiggs finds getting to sleep tricky, this is far more pronounced in the winter, January / February we resorted to Circadin (melatonin) on school nights.  It is very striking now, in Spring, that whilst he still finds it hard we don't need meds.

For life to be liveable he is completely dependent on Indometacin,  with headaches coming back within an hour of the next dose being due.

Yet this week on sunny Saturday he legged it out the door yelling over the noise of the wheels of his cricket bag ....."don't need my tablets - I'm outside all day and it's sunny."  And he was right, he was fine until the evening.  Yet in the winter he even wakes up with a headache, despite the Indo.

So my question is has Wiggs hit the nail on the head?  Is it more sunshine?

Has anyone tried light therapy?????

or more desperately has anyone tried moving abroad?  

I've looked up light therapy on the internet and not much specific to CH/PH.   Any suggestions or experience on the very confusing world of light therapy would be appreciated.

thanks

catherine

Thu, 15/05/2014 - 22:45
Val
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Last seen: 23 hours 9 min ago
Joined: 21/03/2012 - 15:16

CH and PH have peak times of the year for going into cycle, even chronic CHers can notice increased numbers of attacks and pain levels at the same time - spring and autumn when we change the clocks and another big blip in late December/early January.  We know that the hypothalamus reacts to light levels and seasonal changes, and its might account for Wiggs feeling better in the summer months.

Dr Alex Nesbit at the University of Surrey Sleep Research centre would probably be able to explain it better than me and he might be able to help - I'll send you a PM with his contact details.

 

Val. :)

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