medicalnewstoday eye health

Physicians at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center have become the first in Virginia to successfully implant a telescope in a patient's eye to treat macular degeneration. The telescope implant is designed to correct end-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most advanced form of AMD and the leading cause of blindness in older Americans...

The ongoing dance between a virus and its host distinctly shapes how the virus evolves. While human adenoviruses typically cause mild infections, recent reports have described newly characterized adenoviruses that can cause severe, sometime fatal, human infections...

Proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR), or the formation of scar tissue in the eye, is a serious, sight-threatening complication in people recovering from surgical repair of retinal detachment. PVR is difficult to predict, lacks effective treatment options, and substantially reduces an individual's quality of life. Each year 55,000 people are at risk for developing PVR in the United States alone...

Researchers have discovered that using two kinds of therapy in tandem may be a knockout combo against inherited disorders that cause blindness. While their study focused on man's best friend, the treatment could help restore vision in people, too...

But there's still inexplicable fivefold difference in rates across England, similar to wide discrepancies in tonsil removal Rates of surgery to correct childhood squint in England have tumbled over the past 50 years, finds research published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology...

Researchers at Nottingham Trent University have created an artificial eye with a cosmetic pupil that can dilate and contract in response to light. Using smart materials, the prototype aims to solve the longstanding problem of eye loss victims having two different sized pupils at night or in bright sunshine...

The retina is a highly vascularized tissue, but too much or too little vascularization can lead to visual impairment and diseases such as familial exudative vitreoretinopathy or macular degeneration...

Brain researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute have discovered that we explore the world with our eyes in a different way than previously thought. Their results advance our understanding of how healthy observers and neurological patients interact and glean critical information from the world around them. The research team was led by Dr...

Sight is such a spontaneous activity that we are unaware of the complexity of the brain mechanisms it implies. For instance, we easily recognize objects, which appear to look always the same, without realizing that we observe them from ever-changing points of view and that their image - the luminance profile cast onto the retina - varies significantly each time we look at them...

Using new technology and new approaches, researchers at Lund University in Sweden hope to be able to explain why people suffer vision loss in eye diseases such as retinal detachment and glaucoma. Research on diseases of the eye such as retinal detachment and glaucoma has until now focused on the biochemical process that takes place in the eye in connection with the diseases...

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) continues to be the leading cause of visual impairment in the United States for people over age 65, according to a study recently published online in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. AMD is a potentially blinding disease that affects more than 9.1 million Americans...

Wearing contact lenses overnight may offer a non-surgical alternative to restoring near vision without the need for glasses, according to a new Australian study that successfully tested the method in middle-aged patients with presbyopia, or age-related loss of near vision...

A new study raises the intriguing possibility that drugs prescribed to lower cholesterol may be effective against macular degeneration, a blinding eye disease. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in Americans over 50, shares a common link with atherosclerosis...

Until now, researchers looking for the origins of eye diseases like detached retina and glaucoma have focused on biochemical processes...

New research that links the causes of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) with clogged arteries suggests anti-cholesterol drugs may halt the eye disease, the leading cause of blindess among older people in the US. In the 2 April issue of Cell Metabolism, senior investigator Rajendra S. Apte, of the Washington University School of Medicine in St...

By middle age, most people have age-related declines in near vision (presbyopia) requiring bifocals or reading glasses...

After eons of wandering in the dark, primates developed highly acute, three-color vision that permitted them to shift to daytime living, a new Dartmouth College study suggests...

JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) has published a new video article by Dr. Lotfi Merabet showing how researchers in the Department of Ophthalmology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School have developed a virtual gaming environment to help blind individuals improve navigation skills and develop a cognitive spatial map of unfamiliar buildings and public locations...

A new therapeutic target in iron overload disorders Iron is required for multiple cellular functions, including the synthesis of hemoglobin, but a buildup of excess cellular iron can be toxic. Hepcidin is a circulating molecule produced by the liver that triggers the degradation of iron transporters in the intestine and certain immune cells...

Once rhesus monkeys learn to associate a picture with a reward, the reward by itself becomes enough to alter the activity in the monkeys' visual cortex. This finding was made by neurophysiologists Wim Vanduffel and John Arsenault (KU Leuven and Harvard Medical School) and American colleagues using functional brain scans and was published recently in the leading journal Neuron...