Joe Hede is a respected Connecticut entrepreneur who leads Rocket Strategies Inc. and provides investment solutions as head of the Venture Capital Fund. A consistent contributor to the Alzheimer’s Foundation, Joe Hede supports an organization working to find a cure to a disease that profoundly impacted the last decade of his father’s life.
A recent Los Angeles Times article brought attention to a new approach to Alzheimer’s therapy involving the use of sound, in combination with light, in inducing gamma oscillation brain waves. With the pulsating buzz and gently flickering light synchronized at 40 times a second, the test mice had neurons in their brains’ memory circuits start humming at a specific frequency.
Just a week of an hour a day of 40 hertz sound and light therapy caused mice with advanced dementia to regain cognitive abilities associated with memory, such as completing mazes for rewards.
With no breach of the skin, researchers hypothesize that special cells are being recruited in the brain that promote healing and help correct faulty signaling associated with Alzheimer’s. In particular, microglia immune cells, newly energized, enter and begin “vacuuming up” the protein tangles and sticky plaques that cause the disorder.
