Two patients treated with bright white light became hypomanic. Partial relapse appeared within 2 days. Patients treated in winter responded as well as those treated in summer. Beauchemin and Hays90 observed that in a psychiatric inpatient unit, depressed patients in sunny rooms had a significantly shorter hospital stay than those in dull rooms. In a follow-up study,91 they randomly assigned depressed inpatients to high and low levels of artificial light and found that both unipolar and bipolar depressed patients responded more to bright than dim light when used as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy. Bencdetti et al92 also found that length of hospitalization for 415 unipolar Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and 187 bipolar

depressed inpatients was reduced in bipolar patients in eastern rooms Selleckchem Perifosine exposed to direct sunlight in the morning compared with western rooms. No effect was found in unipolar inpatients. In a placebo-controlled, crossover

study of bright light treatment of depression in institutionalized older adults, Sumaya et al93 found that 50% of patients were no longer in the depressed range after Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 1 week treatment with 10 000 lux, but their depression scores were unchanged after placebo (300 lux) or control (no treatment) conditions. Patients with Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical higher depression scores, associated with longer duration of institutionalization, experienced the greatest improvement with the 10 000 lux treatment. Interaction with medication and other antidepressant treatment Levitt et al94 administered a 2-week course of bright Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical light therapy to 10 patients who presented during the winter months with major depression and who had failed an adequate trial of antidepressants, or who had relapsed following

a successful course of antidepressants and found that augmentation with bright lights Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical resulted in substantial improvement in 7 of the 10 patients. Holsboer-Trachsler et al95 reported that adjunctive treatment with bright light or sleep deprivation did not hasten the onset of antidepressant action of the antidepressant trimipramine, but the groups were not balanced on baseline prognostic factors. Neumeister et al96 administered bright (3000 lux) or dim (100 lux) light for 6 days to depressed patients from the morning after they underwent partial sleep deprivation (PSD) treatment. In responders to PSD, bright light therapy prevented the relapse after the Sodium butyrate next night of sleep and significantly prolonged the antidepressant effects of PSD up to 7 days. Patients treated with dim light relapsed after a recovery night of sleep and showed no further improvement of their depressive symptoms after 1 week of dim light treatment. PSD nonrcspondcrs did not benefit from light treatment. Muller et al97 found that the side effects of adjunct bright light therapy as compared with antidepressant (trimipramine) monotherapy included aggravated sedation, restlessness, sleep disturbance, decreased appetite, and vertigo.