The elderly

Cellular ageing affects the biological clock. This explains why elderly people suffer from sleep disorders.

Elderly people tend to go to bed early and wake up early. Each case is special. Nocturnal insomnia can have drastic consequences when such people awake at night, alone and without supervision : there is the risk they might fall and sustain bone fractures (increased fragility of the bones: osteoporosis).

In the cases of such elderly people, taking sleeping tablets is contraindicated, because they diminish memory capacity, which is already deficient in many elderly patients.

Eus Van Sommeren (of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research and VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam) has shown in his study that many elderly people, (the majority of whom suffered from dementia), after receiving light therapy showed improvement in their dementia and in their sleep patterns.

The results of cognitive performance are comparable to those obtained with cholinergic drugs (but without the nausea).

Recommended dosage : ½ hour of light therapy using the SAD light box in the evening around 5 p.m.

Light therapy increases alertness in the evening, and this is experienced by such patients as an improvement in their general condition.