Every morning Kathy Reagan Young steps out of the shower in her Virginia Beach home, towels off, dons a pair of protective goggles and stands nine inches from a light box the size of a small space heater. Young presses a button, and the box’s bulbs begin to glow a ghostly purple. She briefly bathes her torso in the ultraviolet rays coming from the bulbs, four minutes per side. Then she goes about her day.
That Young can have an ordinary day is remarkable. In 2008 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a terrible malady in which the body’s own immune system attacks the sheaths that insulate the nerves, destroying them bit by bit. Symptoms begin with weakness, spasms, vision and speech problems, intense fatigue, and what Young calls “cog fog”—chronic low-grade cognitive impairment. Flare-ups can lead to periods of motor-control loss and paralysis. Young, an advocate for MS patients and creator of a popular podcast, has suffered through many such episodes. But things improved with the arrival of her light box.
Ultraviolet (UV) light boxes, which emit only a narrow bandwidth of light that is not linked to skin cancer, have been used for years in the treatment of psoriasis. Young got a prescription from her doctor, and the box was sent to her by a medical-device company called Cytokind that is hoping to expand such use to MS and other autoimmune diseases and was looking for some practical patient feedback. She tried out the device and gave them some pointers: make it smaller and easier to hold because MS often makes your hands go numb, and build in timed reminders to overcome the cog fog. Then, to her surprise, she found that her fatigue disappeared a few months after she started using it.
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