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Eye Health / Blindness News From Medical News Today
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Latest Health News and Medical News posted throughout the day, every day.
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Windows To The Mind
The eyes are the window into the soul - or at least the mind, according to a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Measuring the diameter of the pupil, the part of the eye that changes size to let in more light, can show what a person is paying attention to...
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Researchers Develop Gene Therapy That Could Correct A Common Form Of Blindness
A new gene therapy method developed by University of Florida researchers has the potential to treat a common form of blindness that strikes both youngsters and adults. The technique works by replacing a malfunctioning gene in the eye with a normal working copy that supplies a protein necessary for light-sensitive cells in the eye to function...
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Retinitis Pigmentosa In Dogs Cured By Gene Therapy
Members of a University of Pennsylvania research team have shown that they can prevent, or even reverse, a blinding retinal disease, X-linked Retinitis Pigmentosa, or XLRP, in dogs. The disease in humans and dogs is caused by defects in the RPGR gene and results in early, severe and progressive vision loss. It is one of the most common inherited forms of retinal degeneration in man...
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Stem Cell Treatment For Blindness Shows Promise In Trials
The first published results of trials using cells derived from human embryonic stem cells appear to show they have passed an initial safety hurdle...
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How Protein In Teardrops Annihilates Harmful Bacteria
A disease-fighting protein in our teardrops has been tethered to a tiny transistor, enabling UC Irvine scientists to discover exactly how it destroys dangerous bacteria. The research could prove critical to long-term work aimed at diagnosing cancers and other illnesses in their very early stages...
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Risk Of Blindness Halved Over Last Decade
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most frequent cause of blindness in the Western World. A report from the University of Copenhagen and Glostrup Hospital in Denmark shows the number of new cases of blindness and severe visual loss in Denmark has been halved during the last ten years...
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Invention Makes Children Eye Exams Inexpensive, Comprehensive, And Simple To Administer
Eighty-five percent of children's learning is related to vision. Yet in the U.S., 80 percent of children have never had an eye exam or any vision screening before kindergarten, statistics say. When they do, the vision screenings they typically receive can detect only one or two conditions...
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Extended Pain Relief For Laser Eye Surgery Patients Via Contact Lenses
Scientists are reporting development of contact lenses that could provide a continuous supply of anesthetic medication to the eyes of patients who undergo laser eye surgery - an advance that could relieve patients of the burden of repeatedly placing drops of medicine into their eyes every few hours for several days. Their report appears in ACS' journal Langmuir...
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Glaucoma Origins May Lead Potential Cure
Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness. Nearly 4 million Americans have the disorder, which affects 70 million worldwide. There is no cure and no early symptoms. Once vision is lost, it's permanent...
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Vitamin D Could Help Combat The Effects Of Aging In Eyes
Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) have found that vitamin D reduces the effects of ageing in mouse eyes and improves the vision of older mice significantly...
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Brain Circuits For Visual Categorization Revealed By New Experiments
Hundreds of times during a baseball game, the home plate umpire must instantaneously categorize a fast-moving pitch as a ball or a strike. In new research from the University of Chicago, scientists have pinpointed an area in the brain where these kinds of visual categories are encoded...
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Glaucoma Measurements Can Be Affected By Contact Lenses
A study about how wearing contact lenses affects glaucoma measurements has been named the top presentation at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine's annual St. Albert's Day research symposium. First author of the study is Marie Brenner, a fourth-year student at Stritch School of Medicine...
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Gene Identified As A New Target For Treatment Of Aggressive Childhood Eye Tumor
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital - Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project findings help solve mystery of retinoblastoma's rapid growth in work that also yields a new treatment target and possible therapy New findings from the St...
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Age-Related Blindness May Be Warded Off By Grapes
Can eating grapes slow or help prevent the onset of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a debilitating condition affecting millions of elderly people worldwide? Results from a new study published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine suggest this might be the case. The antioxidant actions of grapes are believed to be responsible for these protective effects...
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Increasing Need For Rehabilitation For Eye Disease
Visual rehabilitation will continue to increase in importance in the near future, particularly because the number of older patients is rising. Susanne Trauzettel-Klosinski summarizes the present state of knowledge in the current issue of the Deutsches Arzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2011; 108[51/52]: 871-8)...
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Control Of A "Blind" Neuroreceptor With An Optical Switch
When nerve cells communicate with one another, specialized receptor molecules on their surfaces play a central role in relaying signals between them. A collaborative venture involving teams of chemists based at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich and the University of California in Berkeley has now succeeded in converting an intrinsically "blind" receptor molecule into a photoreceptor...
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ED Eye Care In Florida - A Payment Review
A major part of Florida's emergency department eye care is reimbursed through Medicaid or paid for directly by the patients. According to a study published in the Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, these findings may be beneficial in strategic planning as the debate over how best to implement the nation's new health care reform law progresses...
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Dilated Eye Exams For Medicare Beneficiaries Cost Effective, USA
A study published Online First in the Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, suggests that it "would be highly cost-effective" to replace visual acuity screenings for new Medicare enrollees with coverage of a dilated eye exam for healthy patients who enter the government insurance program for the elderly...
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New Research Helps Explain How The Brain Decides What Is A Face And What Just Resembles One
Objects that resemble faces are everywhere. Whether it's New Hampshire's erstwhile granite "Old Man of the Mountain," or Jesus' face on a tortilla, our brains are adept at locating images that look like faces. However, the normal human brain is almost never fooled into thinking such objects actually are human faces...
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Flexible Adult Stem Cells, Right There In Your Eye
In the future, patients in need of perfectly matched neural stem cells may not need to look any further than their own eyes. Researchers reporting in the January issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, have identified adult stem cells of the central nervous system in a single layer of cells at the back of the eye...
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