Am J Psychiatry 1994; 151:591-593
Copyright © 1994 by American Psychiatric Association
Exposure to ambient light in patients with winter seasonal affective disorder
DA Oren, DE Moul, PJ Schwartz, C Brown, EM Yamada and NE Rosenthal
Section on Environmental Psychiatry, Clinical Psychobiology Branch, Bethesda, MD 20892-0010.
In a study of the quantitative relationship between ambient light and
depression in winter seasonal affective disorder, 13 outpatients and 13
normal comparison subjects each wore a light monitor for 1 week. The
patients and normal subjects showed similar light exposure profiles; among
the patients, severity of depression was inversely related to photoperiod,
and there was a trend toward a correlation between greater severity of
depression and later time of onset of morning light exposure. These
findings suggest that vulnerability to short photoperiods may be related to
depression in winter seasonal affective disorder.
