Well it would be a long line.

The way that clinical studies usually work is they test on animals. Once there is some agreement that the therapy is beneficial, they test on healthy human subjects for short periods of time.

Typically with drug tests, they would treat some human subjects with real drugs and several with placebos. Then they would test all the subjects to look for drug interactions and clearance rates. Clearance tests how fast the drug passes out of a healthy subject (usually liver or kidneys). Then several retests to see if the drug cleared, and no adverse results happened.

Now with the helmet, we're talking about a whole new protocol. I would guess that they would get healthy human subjects, and do brain scans to look for new growth. Remember that new growth isn't necessarily a good thing. Cancer is new growth, in fact uncontrolled growth of tissue. Many times when the body grows new tissue, the wrong kind of growth occurs. This is called metaplasia. Anyway, back to scans, one scan they can do is called a PET scan. This measures how much glucose is being used by the brain, a measure of brain activity. Remember that what the only definitive way to measure new neuron growth is dissection: something that no one can ethically do with human subjects.

With Parkinson's or Alzeheimer's or fill-in-the-blank, the scientists running the study would have to measure metabolites, look at brain activity, and run tests on function. Clearly with healthy subjects, you might not see any results. Their brains are already functioning well, and producing say dopamine in the substantia nigra.

The initial studies would only prove that the LED therapy wouldn't cause harm, even if it created more neurons. The definitive tests would have to test actual patients for improvement in motor function.

The whole point of putting the article up here, and coming up with hypothetical helmet schematics is that we want people to know about it, and realize that it may be years, maybe even a decade before they allow human trials. Science moves very slowly, and growing new neurons is not something we do lightly.

If you'd like to put your father in line for a clinical trial, chances are they would only pick him if the limits of his disease were minor. That's my humble opinion. Or if the effects of his Alzheimer's was diagnosed relatively early they might also pick him. Advanced cases probably wouldn't get in the clinical trials.

I encourage you to do everything that your doctors are telling you to do. I know you must be so frustrated by how little we know about Alzheimer's and many other brain type pathologies. We must be moral, ethical, and reasonable in how we gradually release new therapies. Glance through any drugs released over the last decade, and you'll see that many people were harmed by treatments. We have to be oh so careful to do no harm.

If you simply can't wait, some have suggested making a helmet yourself. If you look over the patent, we do know some critical information. You might be able to construct one simply enough and as long as you follow some general safety procedures, you might see some positive outcomes.

We do know that exposing the skin to certain wavelengths of light help people with rosacea, wound healing, cold sores (herpes simplex I), bone spus, etc. It's believed to help with the growth of healthy tissue. Looking over the patent, there seems to be evidence that the LED light at 1072 nanometers seems to grow new neurons in mice.

Several of us have combed the Internet looking for LEDs at this wavelength. They can purchased relatively inexpensively. What we don't know is the power rating of the LEDs. It is clear from the helmet pictures that a large cooling fan is used to reduce the heat output. My guess is that this is proprietary information. They simply don't want to release the exact specs to recapture their investment, and also to be responsible.

I'm not encouraging you to do so, but it would be theoretically possible to take an existing LED light therapy device, insert new LEDS at the right wavelength of 1070 nm, cover the device so the light is exposed to the right areas of the brain (and not exposing the eyes), and do the whole thing in darkness.

I pray for your father and yourself. It is terrible difficult to wait for new treatment options. Please be prudent in whatever you deicde to do.