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Archive for the ‘Vision Loss Research’ Category

WASHINGTON – U.S. health officials have approved a first-of-its-kind technology to counter a leading cause of blindness in older adults — a tiny telescope
implanted inside the eye.

The
Implantable Miniature Telescope
 aims to help in the end stages of incurable age-related macular degeneration, a creeping loss of central vision that blocks reading, watching TV, eventually
even recognizing faces.

The idea: Surgically insert the Implantable Miniature Telescope into one eye for better central vision, while leaving the other eye alone to provide
peripheral vision
. The brain must fuse two views into a single image, and the Food and Drug Administration warned Tuesday that patients need post-surgery rehabilitation
to make it work.

There’s little to help such advanced patients today aside from difficult-to-use handheld or glasses-mounted telescopes, while the new implanted telescope
— smaller than a pea — can improve quality of life for the right candidate, said Dr. Malvina Eydelman, FDA’s ophthalmic devices chief.

But it’s only for a subset of the nearly 2 million Americans with advanced macular degeneration, Eydelman warned: Those 75 and older, with a certain degree
of
vision loss
, who also need a cataract removed. In fact, the FDA took the highly unusual step of requiring that patients and their surgeons sign a detailed “acceptance
of risk agreement” before surgery, acknowledging
potential side effects
 — including corneal damage and worsened vision — and the need for lots of testing to determine who’s a candidate.

“We’re not giving people back 20-year-old eyes,” cautioned ophthalmic surgeon Dr. Kathryn Colby of Harvard and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in
Boston. She helped lead manufacturer
VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies
‘ study of the implant.

But by magnifying images onto more of the retina than its diseased center, someone who before couldn’t see an entire face might now miss only the nose,
Colby said.

In a 219-patient study, the FDA said 90 percent of telescope recipients had their vision improve by at least two lines on an eye chart, and three-quarters
went from severe to moderate vision impairment.

Concern about damage to the inside lining of the cornea, the eye’s clear front covering that helps focus light, held up FDA approval for several years.
In that study, 10 eyes had serious corneal swelling, five that required corneal transplants. FDA’s Eydelman said the company proposed candidate restrictions
to minimize that risk, and will study how an additional 770 recipients fare after sales begin.

VisionCare, of Saratoga, Calif., is seeking
Medicare coverage
 for the surgery and rehab costs, a package that it calls CentraSight. The company wouldn’t estimate total costs but said the device itself costs $15,000.
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As technology greatly improves, we will see more and more devices, and surgeries that will greatly enhance the vision of the visually impaired, plus give new site to the totally blind.  We ahve already made great strides, and we ahve some so far, but we still have a very long way to go before blindness becomes a thing of the past, or at least recognized as a very minor inconvenience.

We here at BOSS fully understand the blind and visually impaired, and our aim is to see these people succeed not only in life, but with their own businesses as well.

We provide these articles to show you that there are many new advancements made in technology that aid the blind and visually impaired to live better, more independent lives.

We urge you to continue to read these articles, and please tell anybody else that you may think would be interested to come and have a great read.  We aim to inform, educate and help in any way possible.

If you want to know more about us, you may contact the following here below.

Donald Brown
Founder
Phone: 409-225-5239
Email: dbrwn@aol.com

Lori Steffen and Jeff Wark
Founders
Phone: 410-433-5943
email: support@netcontentsolutions.com

Dozens of people who were blinded or otherwise suffered severe eye damage when they were splashed with caustic chemicals had their sight restored
with transplants of their
own stem cells
— a stunning success for the burgeoning cell-therapy field, Italian researchers reported Wednesday.

The treatment worked completely in 82 of 107 eyes and partially in 14 others, with benefits lasting up to a decade so far. One man whose eyes were severely
damaged more than 60 years ago now has near-normal vision.

“This is a roaring success,” said ophthalmologist Dr. Ivan Schwab of the University of California, Davis, who had no role in the study — the longest and
largest of its kind.

Stem cell transplants
offer hope to the thousands of people worldwide every year who suffer chemical burns on their corneas from heavy-duty cleansers or other substances at
work or at home.

The approach would not help people with damage to the optic nerve or
macular degeneration
, which involves the retina. Nor would it work in people who are completely blind in both eyes, because doctors need at least some healthy tissue that they
can transplant.

In the study, published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers took a small number of stem cells from a patient’s healthy eye, multiplied
them in the lab and placed them into the burned eye, where they were able to grow new corneal tissue to replace what had been damaged. Since the stem cells
are from their own bodies, the patients do not need to take
anti-rejection drugs.

Adult stem cells have been used for decades to cure blood cancers such as leukemia and diseases like sickle cell anemia. But fixing a problem like damaged
eyes is a relatively new use. Researchers have been studying cell therapy for a host of other diseases, including diabetes and heart failure, with limited
success.

Adult stem cells, which are found around the body, are different from
embryonic stem cells
, which come from human embryos and have stirred ethical concerns because removing the cells requires destroying the embryos.

Currently, people with eye burns can get an artificial cornea, a procedure that carries such complications as infection and glaucoma, or they can receive
a transplant
using stem cells
from a cadaver, but that requires taking drugs to prevent rejection.

The Italian study involved 106 patients treated between 1998 and 2007. Most had extensive damage in one eye, and some had such limited vision that they
could only sense light, count fingers or perceive hand motions. Many had been blind for years and had had unsuccessful operations to restore their vision.

The cells were taken from the limbus, the rim around the cornea, the clear window that covers the
colored part of the eye
. In a normal eye, stem cells in the limbus are like factories, churning out new cells to replace dead corneal cells. When an injury kills off the stem
cells, scar tissue forms over the cornea, clouding vision and causing blindness.

In the Italian study, the doctors removed scar tissue over the cornea and glued the laboratory-grown stem cells over the injured eye. In cases where both
eyes were damaged by burns, cells were taken from an unaffected part of the limbus.

Researchers followed the patients for an average of three years and some as long as a decade. More than three-quarters regained sight after the transplant.
An additional 13 percent were considered a partial success. Though their vision improved, they still had some cloudiness in the cornea.

Patients with superficial damage were able to see within one to two months. Those with more extensive injuries took several months longer.

“They were incredibly happy. Some said it was a miracle,” said one of the study leaders, Graziella Pellegrini of the University of Modena’s Center for
Regenerative Medicine
in Italy. “It was not a miracle. It was simply a technique.”

The study was partly funded by the Italian government.

Researchers in the United States have been testing a different way to use self-supplied stem cells, but that work is preliminary.

One of the successful transplants in the Italian study involved a man who had severe damage in both eyes as a result of a chemical burn in 1948. Doctors
grafted stem cells from a small section of his left eye to both eyes. His vision is now close to normal.

In 2008, there were 2,850 work-related chemical burns to the eyes in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Schwab of UC Davis said stem cell transplants would not help those blinded by burns in both eyes because doctors need stem cells to do the procedure.

“I don’t want to give the false hope that this will answer their prayers,” he said.

Dr. Sophie Deng, a cornea expert at the UCLA’s
Jules Stein Eye Institute
, said the biggest advantage was that the Italian doctors were able to expand the number of stem cells in the lab. This technique is less invasive than
taking a large tissue sample from the eye and lowers the chance of an eye injury.

“The key is whether you can find a good
stem cell population
and expand it,” she said.

Blind Woman Sees With ‘Tooth-in-Eye’ Surgery

Doctors in Florida Restore Sharron Kay Thornton’s Vision by Implanting a Tooth in Her Eye

By LAUREN COX
ABC News Medical Unit

Sept. 17, 2009—

Forget about an eye for an eye — doctors in Florida have taken a
blind
woman’s tooth, and used it to help restore her vision.

A team of specialists at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine announced Wednesday that they are
the first surgeons in the United States
to restore a person’s sight by using a tooth. The procedure is formally called modified osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis (or MOOKP).

Sharron “Kay” Thornton, 60,
went blind
nine years ago from a rare disorder called Stevens-Johnson syndrome. The disorder left the surface of her eyes so severely scarred she was legally blind.
But doctors determined the inside of her eyes were still functional enough that she might one day see with the help of MOOKP.

“This is a patient where the surface of the eye is totally damaged — no wetness, no tears,” said Dr. Victor L. Perez, the ophthalmologist at the Bascom
Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami who operated on Thornton. “So we kind of recreate the environment of the mouth in the eye.”

The three-phase operation started with University of Miami dentist, Dr. Yoh Sawatari, who removed a tooth from Thornton’s mouth and prepared an implant
of her own dental tissue for her
most severely damaged eye.
The tissue would be used to make a new cornea to replace the damaged one.

Doctors then removed a section of Thornton’s cheek that would become the soft, mucus tissue around her pupil. Finally, Perez and his team implanted the
modified tooth — which had a hole drilled through the center — to support a prosthetic lens.

“We use that tooth as a platform to put the optical cylinder into the eye,” explained Perez.

Perez said doctors often use less risky and less invasive techniques to replace corneas, but the damage from Thornton’s Stevens-Johnson syndrome ruled those
out.

Using a tooth might sound strange, but it also offers an advantage. Because doctors used Thornton’s own cheek and tooth tissue she faces less risk that
her immune system will attack the tooth and reject the transplant. Patients getting a cornea transplant from a deceased donor, on the other hand, face
chances that their immune system will reject the new tissue.

This Labor Day, Thornton was able
to take off the bandages
and she immediately saw the light.

Regaining Her Vision With Tooth in Eye Surgery

“From the first day, she’s been able to see 20/70,” said Perez. “She cannot drive legally (yet), but she can see her hands, see TV, see the sky, see the
clouds.”

At the moment, Thornton has nothing covering the cheek tissue on her eye, an aesthetic drawback MOOKP patients must face.

“Her eye looks different but, the goal is once she heals more we can put on a cosmetic eye shield,” said Perez.

The technique was developed in Italy in the early 1960s, but the original procedure has been modified over the years by doctors in Europe. Hundreds of people
in Japan, England and Italy have regained vision through the technique, but most eye specialists in the U.S. don’t foresee MOOKP catching on in America.

“It’s a complicated and rare procedure that a few people use in desperate situations [and] some patients benefit when the alternative is blindness,” said
Dr. Stanley Chang, an ophthalmologist at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

Why the Tooth and Eye Procedure Is Rare

While OOKP is used more often in Europe, doctors U.S. typically choose a less tedious technique called the Boston Keratoprosthesis, which is similar to
MOOKP but uses a prosthetic cornea instead of one grown from dental tissue and does not require cheek tissue to surround the implant.

The Boston technique, experts say, can save patients time and give them a more natural looking eye.

Doctors may use MOOKP for some uncommon situations — including people with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, or who were chemical burn victims — but not always.

“These conditions, although rare or uncommon, are still important because the patients may have little or no vision, and because there have not been very
effective treatments to restore their vision,” said Dr. James Chodosh, a cornea specialist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

However, Chodosh added, “The [MOOKP] procedure is unlikely to be very commonly used because of the difficulty, length, and invasiveness of the surgery and
the cosmetic appearance after surgery.”

Rare Procedures to Reverse Blindness Still Have Benefits

Dr. Uyen Tran, associate professor of ophthalmology at the Vanderbilt Eye Institute, agrees that “these types of patients are not common” and says that
“we probably see about 20 cases a year at our center.”

Yet, while the number of patients for MOOKP may never reach the number of patients getting the Boston Keratoprosthesis, Perez said he hopes to perform more
of these procedures for those in need.

“Absolutely there are a lot of patients like her (Thornton), and also patients with chemical burns& we also want to work with the Department of Defense
to help with soldiers who are scarred,” said Perez.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – Nine-year-old Corey Haas can ride his bike alone now, thanks to an experimental gene therapy that has boosted his fading vision
with a single treatment.

The gene therapy helped improve worsening eyesight caused by a rare inherited disease called Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, which makes most patients
blind by age 40.

Twelve treated patients, including Corey, now have better vision, their doctors told a joint meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Pan-American
Association of Ophthalmology in San Francisco on Saturday.

“All 12 patients given gene therapy in one eye showed improvement in retinal function,” Dr Katherine High of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and colleagues wrote in a report to be released at the same time by the Lancet medical journal.

LCA causes the retina to degenerate and the researchers found that the younger the patient treated with the therapy, the better the effects.

“Before, I used to ride my bike just in front of the house and now I just ride around the neighborhood with no one watching,” Corey told a news conference.

While the experiment was meant mostly to show the treatment was safe, it showed remarkably strong effects, High and Dr Jean Bennett of the University of
Pennsylvania found.

“This study reports dramatic results in restoring vision to patients who previously had no options for treatment,” said High. “These findings may expedite
development of gene therapy for more common retinal diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration.”

BATTERED FIELD

They could also help restore the tarnished image of gene therapy, battered by the death of an 18-year-old volunteer in a clinical trial in 1999 and cases
of leukemia in a few young children treated in France.

“The study by Bennett and co-workers will further boost gene therapy trials and provide hope for patients with inherited blindness and other genetic disorders,”
Dr Frans Cremers and Dr Rob Collin of Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands wrote in a commentary.

A faulty gene means patients with LCA start to lose their vision in childhood. There is no treatment.

High, Bennett and colleagues worked with 12 volunteers, aged 8 to 44. They reported on three of the adult patients in April of 2008.

They designed a harmless virus, called an adeno-associated virus, to carry corrective DNA directly into the eyes. The gene they used, called RPE65, is mutated
in up to about 16 percent of LCA patients and the normal gene restored light-sensitive pigments in the retina at the back of the eye.

The treatment did not restore normal eyesight to any of the patients but half are no longer legally blind.

“The clinical benefits have persisted for nearly two years since the first subjects were treated with injections of therapeutic genes into their retinas,”
Bennett said.

Four children aged 8, 9, 10, and 11 can now walk unaided.

Corey’s father, Ethan Haas, from Hadley, New York, said they embraced the experiment.

“You start to think of what could happen — he could go completely blind. And then it’s like, well, he may go blind in the future anyway because it’s degenerative,
so I decided to try it now and see if we could stop it and correct it,” Haas said.

Corey’s mother, Nancy Haas, said it was worth the risk.

“It’s hard to see a child not be able to play like he should with his other friends, and then to have shortly after surgery, he’s out there with his friends,
playing, being able to see things coming from his peripheral vision, noticing other kids,” she said, beginning to cry.

“It’s all worth it.”

For the first time scientists have used gene therapy to dramatically improve sight in people with a rare form of blindness.

 In four of the six young people who received the treatment, teams of researchers in the United States and Britain reported sight improvement. Two of the volunteers who could only see hand motions were able to read a few lines of an eye chart within weeks.

“It’s a phenomenal breakthrough,” said Stephen Rose, chief research officer of the Foundation Fighting Blindness.

If successful in larger numbers, experts said, the technique has the potential to reverse blindness from other kinds of inherited eye diseases.

The two teams of scientists, working separately, each tested gene replacement therapy in three patients with a form of a rare hereditary eye disease called Leber’s congenital amaurosis. There’s no treatment for the disease, which appears early in infancy and causes severe vision loss, especially at night.

An estimated 2,000 Americans have the form of the disease they targeted.

Read the full story here:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/health/20080427-1032-visionrestored.html

Blinded by an explosion two years ago an Irishman has taken an unusual route to having his sight restored.

Doctors inserted his son’s tooth in his eye, he said on Wednesday.

Bob McNichol, 57 lost his sight in a freak accident. He was told by doctors there was nothing to be done for him. Then McNichol heard about a miracle operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed by Dr Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton in England.

The technique was pioneered in the 1960’s in Italy. It involves creating a support for an artificial cornea from the patient’s own tooth and the surrounding bone.

Robert, McNichol’s 23-year old son donated a tooth, its root and part of the jaw. This was used to rebuild McNichol’s eye socket. Part of the tooth was inserted and then a lens was inserted in a hole drilled in the tooth.

"Now I have enough sight for me to get around and I can watch television. I have come out from complete darkness to be able to do simple things," McNichol said.

Consuming higher-than-average amounts of carbohydrates that cause blood sugar levels to spike and fall rapidly could be a risk factor for central vision loss with aging.

In a study led by Chung-Jung Chiu with Allen Taylor, both at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) in Boston, MA, the researchers analyzed dietary intake from more than 4,000 men and women aged 55 to 80 participating in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study, or AREDS.

Diets high in carbohydrates that are quickly digested and absorbed, resulting in a rapid rise in blood sugar levels, are considered high-glycemic-index diets. Examples of such "fast carb" foods are white bread, rice, potatoes and pasta, and also sugars and corn syrups. Carbohydrates leading to a more gradual rise and fall in blood sugar levels comprise low-glycemic-index diets. Such "slow carb" foods include whole-grain versions of bread, rice and pasta.

Central vision loss is one of the first signs of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease that is one of the leading causes of blindness among the elderly.

Read the full story here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071126153729.htm

The zebrafish may be a small and insignificant fish in some circles but it could hold the key to restoring sight to the blind.

Thezebrafish is a tiny tropical fish, named after its distinctive striped markings.  It has long interested scientists because of its unique ability to repair damaged and diseased cells in its own eyes.

Researchers in Britain have shown for the first time that the special cells which restore sight in zebrafish can also be found in the human eye.

These findings have enormous potential for treament in any diseases where the neurons are damaged, which is basically nearly every disease of the eye."

Diseases damaging the retina, including macular degeneration and glaucoma, account for three quarters of cases of blindness.

Read the full story here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=472220&in_page_id=1770