Eye Health / Blindness News From Medical News Today

iPhones and other smartphones can be a huge help to the visually impaired, but few vision doctors are recommending them to patients, according to a study co-authored by a Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine ophthalmologist. Researchers surveyed 46 low-vision adults from The Chicago Lighthouse and the Spectrios Institute for Low Vision in Wheaton, Ill...

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a genetic test that can accurately predict whether the most common form of eye cancer will spread to other parts of the body, particularly the liver...

Using tiny solar-panel-like cells surgically placed underneath the retina, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a system that may someday restore sight to people who have lost vision because of certain types of degenerative eye diseases...

Better than antibiotics, it is being used in contact lenses to prevent infections and biomedical products are the next stage The superbugs have met their match. Conceived at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), it comes in the form of a coating which has a magnetic-like feature that attracts bacteria and kills them without the need for antibiotics...

Gene Signal, a company focused on developing innovative drugs to manage angiogenesis based conditions, has announced that positive data from a study of aganirsen (GS-101, eye drops) in a nonhuman primate model of choroidal neovascularization has been presented at the 2012 ARVO Annual Meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida...

Gene therapy strategies to prevent and treat inherited diseases of the retina that can cause blindness have progressed rapidly. Positive results in animal models of human retinal disease continue to emerge, as reported in several articles published in Human Gene Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers...

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have discovered that a drug already prescribed to millions of people with diabetes could also have another important use: treating one of the world's leading causes of blindness...

Mayo Clinic and University of Oregon researchers have confirmed that a genetic factor called a repeating trinucleotide is a strong predictor of an individual's risk of developing the eye condition Fuchs' dystrophy. The findings were presented at the annual conference of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in Orlando, Fla...

The one year results from a study into whether two drug treatments (Lucentis and Avastin), are equally effective in treating neovascular or wet age-related macular degeneration (wet AMD), have been reported at an international research meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.* The findings will also appear online in the leading journal Ophthalmology...

Research carried out at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry (PCMD), University of Exeter, has concluded that it would be a safe and cost-effective strategy to screen people with type 2 diabetes who have not yet developed diabetic retinopathy, for the disease once every two years instead of annually...

Sloppy shipping of a donated human retina to an Indiana University researcher studying a leading cause of vision loss has inadvertently helped uncover a previously undetected mechanism causing the disease. The discovery has led researchers to urge review of how millions of dollars are spent investigating the cause of a type of age-related macular degeneration called choroidal neovascularization...

Worldwide, corneas are the most frequently transplanted tissue. However, because of rapid advances, the long-developed technique of complete transplantation, i.e. penetrating keratorplasty (PK) is no longer necessary in many instances...

With aging populations, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is set to increase. AMD, which causes progressive blindness, may already be present in the early stages in 20% of 60 year-olds and those who are older in some countries...

There may be new found hope for patients whose vision is threatened when medicine injected directly into the eyes fails to cause abnormal blood vessels to recede. While injectable drugs called angiogenesis (an-gee-oh-jen-esis) inhibitors are considered a modern miracle and have become the standard of care for patients with the fast-progressive form of macular degeneration, they are not foolproof...

Around 80% to 90% of school-leavers in major East Asian countries like China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea suffer from myopia or short-sightedness...

This week, the second-year results of an important clinical trial on age-related macular degeneration (AMD), known as the Comparison of AMD Treatments Trials (or CATT), were published in the journal Ophthalmology. Researchers found that two drugs known as Avastin (bevacizumab) and Lucentis (ranibizumab), commonly used to treat the wet form of AMD, were similarly effective in maintaining vision...

At two years, Avastin (bevacizumab) and Lucentis (ranibizumab injection), two widely used drugs to treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD), improve vision when administered monthly or on an as needed basis, although greater improvements in vision were seen with monthly administration for this common, debilitating eye disease, according to researchers supported by the Natio...

University of Kentucky researchers, led by Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, have made a major breakthrough in the "dry" form of age-related macular degeneration known as geographic atrophy (GA). GA is an untreatable condition that causes blindness in millions of individuals due to death of retinal pigmented epithelial cells...

Transplanting tissue from newborn fetal membranes prevents blindness in patients with a devastating disease called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a Loyola University Medical Center study has found. The study by senior author Charles Bouchard, MD, and colleagues is published online ahead of print in the journal Cornea...

Results from the largest genetic study of glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness and vision loss worldwide, showed that two genetic variations are associated with primary open angle glaucoma (POAG), a common form of the disease. The identification of genes responsible for this disease is the first step toward the development of gene-based disease detection and treatment. About 2...