Red Light Therapy Might Protect Football Players From Brain Damage

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 28, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Red light therapy might be able to protect football players from brain damage caused by frequent head impacts, a new small-scale study says.

College football players treated with red light therapy over the course of a season wound up with much less brain inflammation than others provided a placebo treatment, researchers recently reported in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

In fact, the study found that the group receiving red light therapy appeared protected from inflammation throughout almost all the regions of the brain.

“My first reaction was, ‘There’s no way this can be real,’ ” lead investigator Hannah Lindsey, a research associate in neurology at University of Utah Health, said in a news release. “That’s how striking it was.”

Red light therapy involves exposing a person to powerful near-infrared light, researchers said in background notes.

The therapy is thought to activate mitochondria, the “power plant” within the body’s cells, thus stimulating cells to work more efficiently.