An American suffering from dementia is showing signs of improvement after visiting the North-East for innovative light therapy.

Health Editor Barry Nelson reports on a potential breakthrough.

CLEM Fennell seemed to have everything going for him.

Happily married to Vickey, a retired schoolteacher, and the father of two grown-up children, Maggie and Clem Jnr, he enjoyed his work as president of the family's engineering firm in Cincinatti, Ohio.

But a few years ago Clem, now 57, who never smoked, rarely drank alcohol and was an athlete in his college days, began to have difficulty holding normal conversations and would be silent for long periods.

"I would ask him, 'what do you think about something', and he would say 'I don't think'," said Mrs Fennell.

That was in 2004.

Concerned at her husband's silences and reluctance to talk, Mrs Fennell arranged for them to see a psychologist.

It was during this session that Mr Fennell blurted out a sentence which struck fear into his wife.

"He said 'something is wrong with me, I can't talk right. I know something is wrong with me.'

"That was in 2006. We were referred to a neurologist who did an MRI scan, then he had five hours of written testing. That's when they came up with the diagnosis of dementia."

It was the lack of any serious treatment options that led the Fennells to contact a GP-turned-inventor in County Durham and fly to the UK - for their first ever visit - to give Mr Fennell the opportunity to be the first patient in the world to be treated by revolutionary light therapy.

Wearing the prototype light-emitting helmet for two 18-minute sessions every day, Mr Fennell's brain has been irradiated with harmless, but healing infra-red light for the past three weeks.

While a full-scale clinical test is needed before the benefits of the device can be confirmed, the inventor, Easington GP Dr Gordon Dougal, is hopeful that light therapy could become a vital weapon in the war against dementia.

Scientists at Sunderland University have already confirmed the healing properties of the infra-red wavelength identified by Dr Dougal as 1072 nanometers.

The doctor, whose business partner is Darlington eye surgeon Jim Haslam, first realised that light therapy could have a healing effect on human tissue when he used a prototype device to clear up cold sores.

Known as Virulite, the hand-held device is available on the NHS.

A second light therapy device now commercially available and known as Restorelite was also developed by Dr Dougal to smooth wrinkles around the eyes. But using light therapy to try to reverse the effects of dementia is the idea which is now exciting the South African-born medic.

As he told The Northern Echo when the newspaper broke the story in January: "The implications of this research are enormous.