Meet our writers

Win $1,000







Health March 2014

Aid for Age

Blindness Cure Advancing with New Studies

By Tait Trussell

A single injection in the patients who suffered with a degenerative eye disease called choroideredmia, which affects one in 50,000 people, helped restore their sight. The disease progresses to complete blindness by middle age.

British scientists have used a functioning gene to replace a defective one to restore sight in six blind men age 35 to 63.

A single injection in the patients who suffered with a degenerative eye disease called choroideredmia, which affects one in 50,000 people, helped restore their sight. The disease progresses to complete blindness by middle age.

The blindness is caused by degeneration in the eye’s retina, which is the part of the eye that sends visual information to the brain.

This gene therapy is a big step past a partial cure for the blind, which I have reported on earlier. That was is a breakthrough for seniors with macular degeneration — the number one cause of blindness. It’s a disease which increases with age. It is possible through a new technology that combines an eye implant with glasses in which is enclosed a tiny video camera. The device is called Argus II.

Perhaps gene therapy someday may lead to a cure for that most common cause of blindness in seniors — macular degeneration.

As for the choroideredmia eye disease, the scientists at the University of Oxford hoped that the functioning gene would stop the cells in their patients’ photo receptors from dying. The men who were patients in the study had not yet reached the stage of blindness, but the disease was advancing.

Six months after the injections of the healthy gene, the team of researchers conducting the trial found the retinas improved in six patients, and two of the patients had substantially improved vision. These results, which have been published in The Lancet medical journal, are encouraging, though this is just the first phase of a trial with a small sample group. So far, the researchers have analyzed only the data from the first 6 months after the procedure, so we don’t know what the long-term effects of this kind of treatment are.

Writing on the results of the trial, Hendrik Scholl, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., said, “The short follow-up of the new study prevents any conclusion about preventing degeneration in the long term. It remains to be determined if gene therapy will have an effect on the progression of photo receptor degeneration. Even if the effect turns out to be only slight, this might have important positive implications because there are additional therapeutic avenues targeting photo receptors that could help to save or restore visual function.”

Age-related macular degeneration might well be one of the diseases that could be subject to gene therapy, the British scientists suggested. If so, the procedure would have very broad consequences. Based on published data, an estimated 8 million older-age Americans are at high risk to develop advanced macular degeneration (AMD). Of these 8 million, 1.3 million would develop advanced AMD within 5 years. However, now with treatment, 300,000 of these patients could avoid the severe vision loss associated with advanced AMD over a 5-year period.

 

Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.

Meet Tait