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Age-Dependent Acute Responsiveness to Transcranial Photobiomodulation

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Dr. Sunghan Kim¹ (), Gabriella Wrightsman¹, Taylor Everett¹, Sushumna Madadi, Dhriti Sinha, Viel Kim; ¹East Carolina University

Infrared light enhances the body’s natural repair ability. Transcranial Photobiomodulation (tPBM) is a therapeutic technique that illuminates low-power LED near-infrared lights placed around the scalp for stimulating the cerebral cortex areas. The photons absorbed by neuronal mitochondria boost their bioenergetic action and cell recovery. The upregulation of mitochondria is linked to the improvement of cognitive functions and emotional regulation. Recent studies report that kids with ADHD display prominent relief in social relationships and sleep quality after eight consecutive months of daily tPBM therapy administered at home. Our team is to examine whether a subject’s age affects his acute responsiveness to tPBM. The hypothesis is that young adults exhibit more positive responses to tPBM than middle-aged adults, possibly due to greater neuroplasticity and better cerebral circulation. Two groups of participants, young adults aged between 18 and 24 and middle-aged adults aged between 35 and 55, are recruited to complete two randomized tPBM sessions with a 20-minute duration, one active and one sham. Visually evoked event-related potentials are collected prior to and immediately after each of the tPBM sessions. Functional connectivity between every pair of EEG channels is estimated creating an adjacency matrix that signifies network coupling strength. Given the adjacency matrix, graph-theoretical analysis derives network-level measures such as clustering coefficient and network diameter, enabling quantitative comparison of large-scale functional connectivity patterns between two age groups. Our previous studies have demonstrated that the graph-theory-based functional connectivity analysis can capture subtle changes in the brain’s large network-level behavior due to interventions.

Topic Area: METHODS: Electrophysiology