Preventing blindness from age-related macular degeneration: a new ...

Even if it affects only 1 in 10,000 people, Stargardt disease is the most common form of macular degeneration associated with the legacy and is caused by mutations in a gene responsible for vitamin A treatment. Altered vitamin A in the treatment leads to the acceleration due to Stargardt vitamin A dimer formation and accumulation of lipofuscin and subsequently the early onset of visual symptoms, leading to blindness in almost every case. There is currently no treatment for Stargardt?s disease.The concentrations of these dimers are higher in the eyes of the elderly and those with certain inherited eye diseases. Vitamin A dimers are also insoluble pigment granules called lipofuscin. But in genetic diseases such as Stargardt?s disease, this process can occur very quickly, resulting in loss of vision in the beginning as young as 8.

Slow aggregation or ?clumping? of vitamin A in the eye may help prevent vision loss caused by macular degeneration, research from Columbia University Medical Center found.

In animal studies, the laboratory of Dr. Washington has made the synthesis of vitamin A modification of drug hydrogen isotope deuterium rather than integration protonium in selected locations. Dr. Washington and his lab hypothesized that these changes would make the bond involved in dimerization harder to break, which could slow dimerization. Powering the new drug vitamin healthy mice, were able to reduce the amount of vitamin A dimers without any observed side effects, said Dr. Washington, Assistant Professor Michael Jaharis for Ophthalmic Sciences at Columbia

?Of course cancer is often long and devastating and, despite advances in diagnosis and treatment, many more succumbing to cancer,? said Stephen Albert Johnston, director of the Biodesign Institute at ASU Center for innovations in medicine and host of the conference. ?We try to encourage the community to radically rethink our approach to cancer problem. The purpose of this meeting is to have scientists and doctors to reflect on how it could grow all our advances in technology and knowledge base by making a vaccine would be given to all adults to prevent the occurrence of cancer. ?

When administered to mice with the same genetic defect in human beings suffering from Stargardt?s disease, which usually cause the loss of vision at the beginning, modified vitamin A has resulted in less than vitamin A dimers, eye health better and improved vision. Important, also noted that vitamin A changed behaved exactly like vitamin A normal. Done in all other aspects, which makes it attractive potential of a therapy to prevent blindness in humans

Rather than changing the way the eye processes vitamin A, a team of researchers led by Ilyas Washington, a professor in the department of ophthalmology at the Harkness Eye Institute Columbia, has decided to focus on changing the structure of vitamin A itself. In turn, Dr. Washington and his lab have taken a new step towards the treatment of age-related macular degeneration , a leading cause of irreversible blindness ? and Stargardt?s disease, the most common cause of juvenile macular degeneration.

Dry-AMD affects about 10 million Americans and is the leading cause of blindness in the Western world. Among these, approximately 3 million Americans are at high risk of irreversible visual loss, and a million of them are severely visually impaired due to a late form of AMD-dry.

There is currently no treatment for dry-AMD.

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