Retinal diseases often lead to blindness, but a new treatment shows promise

mda2staff — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 14:51:57 +0000

Researchers have uncovered a potential new strategy for treating retinal eye diseases that affect millions of people around the world, often resulting in blindness.

By: Jahnavi Sarma

Tags: Eye health Retinal cells Retinal degenerative diseases vision problems

Many serious eye diseases feature abnormal overgrowth of new retinal blood vessel branches, which can lead to progressive loss of vision. @Shutterstock

There are many different types of retinal diseases, but almost all of them lead to damage of the retinal and vision loss. The retinal is a thin layer of tissue on the inside back wall of your eye, which contains millions of light-sensitive cells and nerve cells that receive and send visual information to the brain through the optic nerve. This is what enables you to see. If there are any problems with the retina, available treatment options will stop the progress of the disease and preserve and restore vision. But this is not always successful.

Now researchers have uncovered a potential new strategy for treating eye diseases that affect millions of people around the world, often resulting in blindness. Many serious eye diseases — including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and related disorders of the retina — feature abnormal overgrowth of new retinal blood vessel branches, which can lead to progressive loss of vision. It’s a phenomenon called “neovascularization.”

Most Drugs Come With Safety Issues

For the past decade and a half, eye doctors have been treating these conditions with drugs that block a protein, VEGF, that’s responsible for spurring new vessel growth. Such drugs have improved the treatment of these conditions, but don’t always work well and have potential safety issues. The current study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a new approach that doesn’t target VEGF directly is highly effective in mice and has broader benefits than a standard VEGF-blocking treatment.

New Treatment Cause Rejuvenation Of Healthy Retinal Capillaries

Researchers from Scripps Research Institute in the US were thrilled to see how well this worked in the animal model. There really is a need for another way to treat patients who do not respond well to anti-VEGF treatments, they say. For the findings, the research team conducted tests in a mouse model of retinal hypoxia and neovascularization, using a fragment of CITED2 that contains its functional, hypoxic-response-blocking elements. They showed that when a solution of the CITED2 fragment was injected into the eye, it lowered the activity of genes that are normally switched on by HIF-1a in retinal cells, and significantly reduced neovascularization. Moreover, it did so while preserving, or allowing to re-grow, the healthy capillaries in the retina that would otherwise have been destroyed –researchers call it “vaso-obliteration” — in this model of retinal disease….

Read more: https://www.thehealthsite.com/diseases-conditions/eye-health-diseases-conditions/retinal-diseases-often-lead-to-blindness-but-a-new-treatment-shows-promise-775811/

Source: The Health Site

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Retinal diseases often lead to blindness, but a new treatment shows promise

Researchers have uncovered a potential new strategy for treating retinal eye diseases that affect millions of people around the world, often resulting in blindness.