You come into contact every day with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) -- they illuminate alarm clocks, new televisions, traffic lights, and smartphone displays. Increasingly, you will see white-light versions of LEDs becoming available for energy-efficient home lighting, car headlights, and streetlamps.
What you may not know is that the most common form of white LEDs -- which emit a spectrum of colors, including blue light -- is inadvertently effective at sending signals to our brain’s biological clock, which regulates daily activities such as sleep.
The realization of the body's special sensitivity to blue light has spurred scientific investigations of whether the light can disrupt our circadian rhythms, the roughly 24-hour cycle in animals that sets the body's patterns for sleep and other biological processes.
While organizations such as the International Dark-Sky Association urge caution on using white LEDs for outdoor nighttime lighting and some scientists are already calling for regulations to ban the outdoor use of blue-rich light, others estimate that the effects are small and caution that more rigorous scientific studies are needed before determining if white LED light has any health impacts at all. Some scientists argue that other factors, such as sleep deprivation and abnormalities in a person's overall 24-hour pattern of exposure to light and dark, may do much more to disrupt circadian rhythms. Epidemiological studies have linked circadian disruptions to health problems, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and obesity, and scientists are trying to determine if light at night -- and blue-rich LEDs -- are a cause.
Abraham Haim of the University of Haifa in Israel considers white LEDs a form of "light pollution." "What is called 'friendly' environmental illumination is unfriendly," said Haim, who is a chronobiologist, a scientist who studies biological rhythms and cycles in animals. He has conducted studies showing that blue light can disrupt circadian-related hormones in nocturnal animals such as voles, moles and rats.
Absolutely, IMO. The encroachment of all types of artificial lighting at night is greatly affecting human diurnal cycles. And the full health ramifications are still unknown. Night is supposed to be dark. Get it? To read more, click here.