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Initial Signs of Glaucoma are Evident in the Brain
In a recent study, David Calkins, Ph.D., director of Research at the VEI, discovered that the first sign of injury in glaucoma actually occurs in the brain.
Glaucoma is generally considered a disease of the eye in which sensitivity to ocular pressure causes damage to the retina and optic nerve, which are components of the central nervous system and do not regenerate. The damage begins in the peripheral visual field and progresses toward the center resulting in complete blindness unless detected early. For this reason, degeneration in glaucoma is often hard to detect.
The report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes recent experiments in which Calkins' laboratory shows that glaucoma is very much like other central nervous system diseases.
"This is a paradigm shift on how we think about this disease," said Calkins, associate professor of Ophthalmology at VEI and a member of the neuroscience program. "This will have global implications. This information opens up an entirely new domain of nerve-derived therapeutics."
Combining this new understanding of where the first neuronal injury for glaucoma occurs, with the fact that the incidence of injury increases with age, researchers now have insight into how the loss of sensory function occurs in normal aging.
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More News on: Glaucoma, Parkinsons Disease, Parkinsons Disease Surgical Treatment, Eye, Brain, Geriatry-Related Diseases, Brain Facts, Vision, Blindness Facts, Eye Redness
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