End To Blindness? 102
Kevin writes "For the first time ever, researchers from a company called Optobionics surgically implanted an artificial retina into three patients who are blind from retinitis pigmentosa. These highly-experimental prosthetic devices, made of silicone computer chips, are intended to restore ambulatory vision, thereby giving people the freedom to walk without the assistance of a cane or guide dog.
Researchers are begining to develop computer chips that might function in place of
damaged photoreceptor cells."
"Silicone" Computer Chips? (Score:2)
cooooool (Score:1)
Bugs (Score:1)
What percentage of people will this help? (Score:1)
This seems like a pretty big deal, but I wonder what percentage of blindness it would actually 'cure'? I, for example, lost my right eye due to a vascular tumor when I was unborn. The tumor caused damage to the optical nerve, so this wouldn't work for myself or others in a similar situation.
Ummm... (Score:4)
From the people who brought you..... (Score:1)
Cybernetics (Score:1)
A similar device could, for instance, be used to enhance the vision of an already healthy eye. Maybe interfacing with another device to allow concurrent interpretations of multiple images.
I'm not sure if I am excited or scared.
The Borg tried to assimilate the humans, they should have let them assimilate themselves.
And soon, the world. (Score:1)
I'd like to "see" this tech in action. I hope it's an improvement over the ultrasound ones I've seen. They look horrible; however, I've never really been totally blind, just mostly blind.
Something like this combined with a good wearable PC and I'll never need to enter meatspace again.
Re:"Silicone" Computer Chips? (Score:2)
How weel will this work? (Score:3)
Re:What percentage of people will this help? (Score:2)
As I understand it, not much. I saw something very similar to this a few months ago, but the new retina consisted of about 6 pixels, which were wired directly into the optic nerve. They were triggered when the wearer was close to something, or when confronted by a bright object.
Now, although the resolution isn't great, it's a hell of a lot better than nothing - the patient they tested it on could distinguish some objects, and tell when he was close to walls and stuff.
The big difference though, was that the retina was external, mounted on his forehead, I think, but it still wired into his optic nerve, which was the important advance.
Viewing resolution (Score:2)
You Like Science?
And afterwards... (Score:1)
-or, for the Ender fan in you-
Wearable computing? (Score:3)
Re:"Silicone" Computer Chips? (Score:1)
Maybe they should get their priorities straight (Score:2)
Not all blindness (Score:1)
Cyano
Oh yeah - whoever registered my
Don't forget diabetes (Score:1)
And the Bad News is... (Score:4)
Re:cooooool (Score:1)
Next stop cybernetic implants! I wanna make myself a superhero!
-Phlod
The device (Score:3)
Perhaps it is cooler that someone is simply attempting to cure blindness in such a way. The sensory periphery for audition and vision is amenable to implants - in vision, for example, the retina holds about a million nerve cells arranged in a nice topographic array. In the cochlea there are a few tens of thousands of hair cells in a nice spiral array. A company spawned from the Otolaryngology labs at UCSF makes the only US designed cochlear implants (Advanced Bionics).
Of course, the optobionics device will be out of focus since the eye focusses light on the retina and not on the silicon chip. But hey - it'd be amazing if they could simply get enough current out of their device to stimulate a neuron. You'd need at least 10 microamps. The upside is that you do not need a power supply or wire lead into the retina - a tricky engineering feat for other retinal implant designs.
They didn't report if any of their patients implanted in late June had any vision yet. Guess what - they would be seeing by now if the implant worked. So my guess is that the device is a bust. And unfortunately, you don't really get that many clinical trials to fail in your device, no matter how well capitalized you are.
The other difficult thing about retinal implants is the number of stimulating sites required. You can hear speech with 8 stimulating electrodes and very good temporal fidelity. For vision - temporal fidelity is not so stringent, but you need at least 100 stimulating electrodes, each capable of pushing 10 microamps (AC, for a brief brief period). The problem is that you need to power the chip, and to do that you need a cable running into the eye. That probably necessitates the cutting or at least paralysis of the eye muscles, and a very tricky connection through the cornea. So you can see the allure of the optobionics device.
These guys are, however, great at marketing and fundraising. There will be a flurry of such press releases and fund raising bouts, for optobionics and other retinal stimulation companies. The presidents of the companies will get rich. I just hope one of them recruits a decent engineer so that someone gets to see again too. It doesn't seem like their approach is hopeless - but it certainly needs modification.
Not an end to all forms of blindness (Score:2)
Stuart Eichert
A wee bit of devil's advocate.. (Score:2)
I'm not a doctor, but it seems to me that there's more than one way for a person's eyes to not, or stop, work(ing), simply by excersising a bit of common sense. I mean, it's like saying that breast removal "cures cancer". Not quite.. it fixes one FORM of cancer (or, well, it can).
More power to these guys if it helps even a fraction of the blind folks out there.. but without more information than a press release, I remain skeptical that this is going to help everyone that has an eye problem. All the information available indicates it only repairs a rather narrow brand of blindness.
I'd just be wary of labelling these guys gods. Minor deity's, perhaps, because the achievment is pretty major.. but it seems to me it's only one step in the entire staircase.
What?!?! (Score:1)
This just goes to prove a pet peeve of mine: not even quasi-scientific journalists can write a decent headline!
Title of actual article:
"Vision Researcher First to Implant an Artificial Retina in Humans"
I mean, c'mon: it's an artificial RETINA. It's a darn good thing it was a VISION researcher that did it first; just imagine the poor patients if a cutting-edge proctologist had done the implantation - no telling how THAT would "come out in the end" (proctology humor, sorry). And it's not even like the article is on some generic news site where they need to be extra-specific just to pander to the LCD (that's Lowest Common Denominator, not Liquid... oh nevermind). It's on blindness.org [blindness.org] for cryin' out loud! I highly doubt they run a lot of stories about podiatry or stomach ulcer research...
</RANT>
Brains are resilient (Score:1)
Re:Not an end to all forms of blindness (Score:1)
Blindness.org: Incompatible for Disabled Use. (Score:1)
This is a gross mistake on the part of blindness.org. How do they intend to help if their audience can't read their page?
Ugh.
Re:Maybe they should get their priorities straight (Score:1)
More research needed (Score:1)
The hard choice between the different eye-makers (Score:1)
This just in:
With all the new optical eye companies abounding there seem to be 2 main choices:
1) IBM PCEye -- You get very fast refresh rates but it costs significantly more for a more "true color" version of the optical eye.
2) AppleEye -- You get perfectly true color and are able to see the world in ways few people do. The problem with this, though, is that the current refresh rate is 3 times per second -- and it costs a QUITE significant amount of money to purchase an optical eye that has a better refresh rate.
Back to you George. . .
Re:The device (Score:2)
A tiny laser, possibly IR or some other frequency, positioned on the rim of a pair of glasses, pointed through the iris to a photocell receiver inside the eye? No messy cables or paralysis.
But that's true of most diseases! (Score:2)
Even many infectious diseases can be prevented with cheap stuff you can find around the home. Most STDs can be prevented by cheap latex barriers. Most malarial diseases can be prevented by proper screens and nettings. Most intestinal parasites can be prevented by proper sewage disposal.
The question you have to ask yourself, though, is can a buck be made by handing out this free and sensible advice? Most problems could be solved at lower cost by addressing these causes directly instead of treating their symptoms, but it's not as sexy and it runs contrary to human nature.
One inevitable question... (Score:1)
Sure, we may never be able to find the answer. Try asking one of these patients what color a flower is. If it wasn't instilled in their mind, they wouldn't know.
umm... (Score:1)
Watch it, /. (Score:1)
Re:Curing blindness is good, but I want IR/UV visi (Score:1)
So, Apples ARE good for something after all... (Score:2)
However, the good news about the Apple version, is they'll be able to daisy chain other sensory functions off of the eyes. Experiments are being right now, to see if this is a viable solution to male impotence.
Re:Brains are resilient (Score:1)
Exaggeration? (Score:2)
Why would you even want to say this is the case? I think a headline like "Further progress made restoring sight" would have been just as exciting and not at all a letdown when I read the actual article. Why claim miracles when simply describing current technology is amazing enough?
Re:Blindness.org: Incompatible for Disabled Use. (Score:1)
Not sure where you got the idea that the article wasn't readable by blind users.
Re:cooooool (Score:1)
Re:Brains are resilient (Score:2)
Actually, brains are remarkably flexible, but it's also equally interesting where they are not flexible.
A fascinating book on the subject is called Why Michael Couldn't Hit (and Other Tales from the Neurology of Sports) [amazon.com]. The author, a Neurologist, talks about the brain's role in becoming a world-class athlete. The title is in reference to asking the question of why Michael Jordan, possibly the best basketball player in history, utterly failed to be a competent baseball player.
It turns out that to be a world-class athlete, there are certain critical neurological growth periods where you have to play the sport or you will never be world-class in the sport. What's interesting is that the age seems to vary based on the sport. Most critical periods seem to be in adolescence, but he also talks about the fact that world-class violinists have to start at a very early age (like 5 or something) or it's simply too late.
You don't have to be into sports to enjoy the book. I found it extremely interesting because rarely do you see information about what the brain can't do.
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Re:The device (Score:1)
Re:Maybe they should get their priorities straight (Score:2)
Seeing as how most of the world's ignorance can be cured by providing free in-house tutoring to the underprivileged, maybe your time would be better spent in the ghetto educating the young?
Seeing as how we have plenty of problems to deal with on the ground, perhaps we should never have developed a space program? Oh wait, that gave us incredible leaps in technology. Or as NASA's website puts it, "Orbiting spacecraft transmit information like phone calls and television signals around the globe with extreme speed and precision. Other satellites monitor the weather and the health of the atmosphere, the dynamics of the oceans and the vitality of the land. Satellite-based navigation systems aboard airplanes and boats enable people to determine their geographic position and heading with greater accuracy than ever before. This improves safety and makes travel more efficient."
Now, I know this article isn't about space travel, but there is a parallel here. NASA's site continues, "Technology created to prepare systems and people to operate in the harsh conditions of space contributes to advances in composite materials, electronics, robotics, medicine, energy production, manufacturing, transportation and many other areas of human activity." And then points out the thing I really want you to notice: "In many cases, these advances would occur much more slowly or not at all without the challenge of space exploration."
This research is just the same deal. The things we learn in this kind of research may give us insight both into curing other kinds of blindness, as well as detecting them more easily and preventing them. Furthermore, however, it may also give us insight into other bits of science which are not related to blindness, or even unrelated to vision.
There's more to vision than simply an image (Score:2)
I recall a story in one of the Oliver Sacks [amazon.com] books about someone who had "motion blindness". There are parts of the brain that process motion, and the patient could see things that were still, but could see them in motion. It wasn't a tracking problem, it was a perception problem. The patient literally couldn't perceive objects in motion.
By the way, anyone who is interested in how the brain works and the nature of perception, concousness and reality should pick up some of his books. They are absolutely fascinating. Any of them will do. Sometimes the best way to see how the brain works is looking at the various ways it can malfunction.
One last story: he had a patient how could only percieve things on the right side of her, but not on the left. She was perfectly rational. Her vision was perfect. She simply couldn't percieve it. When she ate, she would have to eat from the right side of her plate, then turn the plate around. Then eat half of that. Then turn it around again, etc until there was nothing left.
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Re:Not an end to all forms of blindness (Score:2)
Re:One inevitable question... (Score:1)
If you'd read up on RP, however, you'd know that the people this will help are people who once could see.
Beauty (Score:1)
Re:Blindness.org: Incompatible for Disabled Use. (Score:1)
Really? It seems to me that all the text images on the site have ALT attributes. What else should they be doing? Not to mention the fact that there is, in fact, a text-only site.
Re:Blindness.org: Incompatible for Disabled Use. (Score:1)
What I meant was that the whole thing is one big friggin' table. If you do go in the text-only site, though, speech based and braille based browsers will do fine.
If a blind slashdot user clicked on the above link, though, he'd be screwed. If he could read Slashdot at all.
but the brain does most of the "seeing" (Score:1)
The brain is known to be able to mallable and it has been known shift functions from damage areas to other areas. However, current literature suggests that recovery will be minimal given the complexity of the visual system.
These type of restoration will probably only help those who have recently become blind.
Re:Beauty (Score:1)
Being as good as the human eye may not be strictly necessary. Your vision system is pretty sophisticated and if you have (for example) solder burns on the surface of your eye, it will wander independently of the other to get the information that would otherwise be obscured by the burn.
Also, it doesn't sound like this is digital technology at all; It sounds more like they're using small, hyperefficient photovoltaic cells directly attached to electrodes which get stuffed into the existing (damaged) retina; It's basically a synthetic analogue for the analog retina. Backing this up is something I found on Optobionics [optobionics.com]' website which states "The area of the retina that receives and processes the detailed images--and then sends them via the optic nerve to the brain--is referred to as the macula. The macula is of significant importance in that this area provides the highest resolution for the images we see. The macula is comprised of multiple layers of cells which process the initial "analog" light energy entering the eye into "digital" electro-chemical impulses." The site says that the ASR is made up of an array of "microphotodiodes".
This page [centrovision.com] is a primer on photodiode technology.
It states that "Silicon photodiodes are most useful as current generators although a voltage is also generated by illumination. Most of the data supplied in this manual refers to the short circuit current characteristics of the photodiodes. The short circuit current is a linear function of the irradiance over a very wide range of at least seven orders of magnitude. The Isc is only slightly affected by temperature, varying less than 0.2% per degree C for visible wavelengths. A recently published independent laboratory study has shown Thermo Centro Vision photodiodes to have Isc stability better than +/-0.25% per year."In other words - I was right. Yay!
Re:Wearable computing? (Score:1)
Re:Beauty (Score:1)
Re:Curing blindness is good, but I want IR/UV visi (Score:1)
This page [centrovision.com] (a primer on photodiodes) has a chart of Photodiode Responsivity. You start to get reasonable response out of them around 600nm, which is actually before the infrared range, which begins at 750nm [dictionary.com]. Interestingly enough, this page also have a chart which compares their Series E photodiode to that of the Human Eye [centrovision.com].
In any case, you could almost certainly tune one of these suckers to let you see into the IR range. I'm not sure you'd want to, if you had ever had normal eyesight, but it is an interesting idea. Certainly if you could embed them as seperate entities, AND turn them on and off, then you could selectively see into the infrared range in a selective manner without seriously compromising your natural vision.
When prosthetic eyes are better... (Score:2)
This would also lead to the manufacturer putting non-ignorable advertisements in your vision!
Imagine the type of virtual billboards you could have!
Re:How will will this work? (Score:2)
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Re:Brains are resilient (Score:1)
Did the book say anything about the age when someone would start playing to become a world class guitarist?
The book is packed away in a box somewhere, but I don't recall anything specific to guitarists. The book is mostly about sports where there is a fair amount of empirical evidence (by looking at current and historical players and when they began). Violinists have fairly formalized training, so he had some knowledge to draw from there. I don't know if anyone has studied guitarists.
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Re:The device (Score:1)
Of course, the optobionics device will be out of focus since the eye focusses light on the retina and not on the silicon chip.
Why wouldn't it focus on the array? I know nothing about occular biology but I believe that the eye's focus system is a closed-loop system. i.e. you know what you want to focus on and control the lens such that what you desire to see is in focus. How else could you look at your hands and then at the wall and focus on both if the lens was a fixed-focus "device"?
Re:cooooool (Score:1)
So my guess would be that you're preaching to the converted
I hope this works out...having RP must really suck. Well, I thought needing glasses sucked, but I guess I should count my blessings.
Actually this is an interesting thing (Score:2)
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Macular Degeneration (Score:4)
How do blind people visualize? (Score:5)
How do people that have been blind their entire life visualize things?
I don't mean to imply that they can't visualize, only that I'm wondering about the extent of their ability to create mental images and how they differ from my own (FYI, I am not blind). That is, it seems as thought they could feel an object and create some sort of wireframe-like thing in their head. Maybe a more appropriate question would have been directed at what they visualize. Most my visualization consist of a combination of things I've perceived with my eyes, not to mention issues associated with color.
Well, there's my potentially ignorant question that's probably only answerable by either blind people or someone who has close contact with them.
Educate us.
Re:Brains are resilient (Score:2)
Re:Viewing resolution (Score:4)
Actaully, you can only see at something less than 200x200, with horribly lossy images. Your brain interpolates everything you see. Interesting factoid: your optic nerve carries more information to the retina than it carries to the brain.
When you get into real neurology 101, things get really interesting (even if you're auditing for amusement as an armchair scientist).
Has anybody else noticed morie effects in real life? There is a stretch of I-95 in Palm Beach Country, as you pass over Lake Worth Road... heading north, you can see the side of the water treatment plant. The side has close horizontal slats, all painted an off-white color. As you drive towards it on a bright day, it comes alive with "dancing bugs", similar to two morie patterns overlaid and rotating. The distance at which this occurs is different for different individuals. Some people can't see it, but that may be because they didn't know what to look for.
--
Evan
I have a personal interest in this (Score:1)
Maybe i can get one so i can see infrared!
i'd want to be able to turn that off occasionally tho....
hey, something is better than nothing!
Re:Don't forget diabetes (Score:1)
Re:Dont breed! (Score:1)
"People need to take genetic self responsibiility by not injecting their defective DNA into the genepool!"
Well...sorry....but sometimes, a disability makes for a better person. I, personally, wouldn't mind if the whole world were infected with her DNA. Sure, we might not be able to see, but it would be a hell of a lot better place than it is now!
She's in a regular college right now, taking regular classes. She doesn't want to be treated different than anyone else. She works much harder than a normal person to do the same things. I, for one, hope she has lots of kids just like her--even if they have RP, like i said, the world will be just a bit better.
Moral of the story: usually people with something that doesn't make them 'normal' perform better personally, sociably, and at work. Most assholes are just 'normal' people.
Re:Dont breed! (Score:1)
> makes for a better person.
You wont get any argument here. A very good friend of mine has a genetic disorder - I forget the name but his body muscle mass is severely decreased.
Nicest guy I ever met. Very intelligent.
However - I do think that it is wise for people with such disorders to not breed. I don't mean to say that a person who has had offspring is bad for having done it - its a personal choice, but -you get good people without genetic diseases too.
Personally, I have reservations about breeding myself (my father and I were both born epileptic - its treatable and mine went away around age 15 - but his never did). I don't know that I would feel comfortable having a child, knowing that there is a pretty good chance that they would have to live with that (even if it goes away - it means an entire childhood on drugs like dilantin and tegretol)
If other people can do it thats fine with me. I just don't feel right about forcing a person into a life like that.
Of course - I would unilatterally encourage everyone to stop breeding anyway. Theres plenty of humans now. We can cut back on production now.
-Steve
-Steve
Re:Also, try our Infrared Terminator Tracker Model (Score:1)
It works pretty good, but it gave me a horrible case of red-eye [primenet.com].
--Joe--
Program Intellivision! [schells.com]
repeat again (Score:2)
Re:"Silicone" Computer Chips? (Score:1)
Re:Ummm... (Score:1)
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Re:The hard choice between the different eye-maker (Score:1)
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Harold Ridley's idea is cool too. (Score:1)
Marginally off-topic, but losing your sight through cataracts makes you worry about retinal detachment. I should know, I have two such implants.
Anyway, did you know Harold Ridley came up with the idea for implantable lenses after pulling bits of cockpit plastic from the eyes of Royal Air Force Spitfire pilots, and noticing that the plastic didn't irritate?
Re:Viewing resolution (Score:2)
But the eye is as prone to aliasing artifacts as any other point sampling device. The only reason you dont see massive jaggies on everything is that the distribution of receptor cells is something approximating a poisson disk distribution, rather than a regular grid.
It just does the standard graphics trick of hiding aliasing behind "noise".
Re:We are Borg! (Score:1)
Sadly I can't see this kind of technology coming along in any of our lifetimes
Re:Wearable computing? (Score:1)
not be good enough for text-information transfer.
Early tests on cats showed that a computing intensive system could read neuro-signals
and interprete them into a blurry picture.
The brain can handle a blurry picture and figure out what it's supposed to look like.
But what do you do if you have blurry text?
Information gets lost...
I'm like "good RAM, bad CPU"
Color blindness? (Score:1)
Transplants don't help those blind since birth (Score:1)
-ShieldWolf
Re:Dont breed! (Score:1)
Re:Viewing resolution (Score:1)
If you are ever in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, stop by the museum that bears his name.
But what about blind culture? (Score:1)
So what's the analogous dispute here? Rallies of deaf folks complaining that blind kids shouldn't be given the specious "gift" of sight? People protesting that braille shouldn't die as a language? From the perspective of someone who isn't deaf or blind, it's hard to imagine...
Re:"Silicone" Computer Chips? (Score:1)
(sorry I just had to =)
What I'd like to know.. (Score:3)
Back in March, April, and May, I had sugery to reattach my retina after I got hit by that drunk driver. (I had surgery two or three times to do that!) What I'm wondering is, if it gets really bad, and they can't do anything for the retina, will one of these help? And would it help me ride a motorcylce again?
-- jason, who's so looking forward to riding again.
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
Re:How do blind people visualize? (Score:2)
Good questions. This really comes down to an issue of epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge, or how it is that we can know things).
A quick answer is that blind people can visualize some things that exist in the world. For example, they could visualize what a cube looks like if they have touched it and felt the edges. Blind people can visualize reality because they exist in it and participate in it. For example, they can (and must) be able to visualize the layout of their houses because they will be walking around in them.
What they can not do is visualize the less empirical things, for example the color blue. "Blue" is defined to be the range of colors whose wavelengths are slightly above the ultraviolet spectrum. If you tell a blind person that a cube is blue, they will catch the cube part but not understand what you *really* mean by blue because they have never experienced blue. A blind scientist would know that electromagnetic radiation with a certain wavelength is considered to be "blue", but wouldn't really know what blue is because it is something that really isn't understood until it is seen. When I visualize blue, I get a little bit of red, a little bit of green, and alot of blue. For a blind person who has never seen blue, they get a schematic of wavelengths.
It would be interesting if we had the ability to give someone who was blind from birth the ability to see. How they perceive reality would change dramatically! They would have to learn to associate the words we have given to colors as well as quite a few other things.
Re:How do blind people visualize? (Score:3)
The simple answer is that they can't. The first experiments to restore sight in the late 1700s with cataract replacement surgery were a failure because there is a small window of opportunity in the development of the visual cortex. Even people who are not born blind but have been blind a long time have a lot of trouble becoming visual again and many don't succeed. Blind people seem to have significantly different models of the world (e.g. they generally conceptualize distance in terms of time, not spacial referents) and changing back is often more than most can manage.
By the same token, people who are sighted often have a lot of trouble adapting to being blind because they are not wired correctly either.
Re:How weel will this work? (Score:4)
Implant a receiver, have clip-on alternate sensors (Score:1)
Or, for the more paranoid among you, it could also be something The Man would implant into navy SEALs and Mossad agents... sure, they look like normal humans, but when they put on their special visors, they get UV, IR, RF vision, and with the built-in wireless WAN, what Sgt. Smith sees, everybody in the unit (and back at the base) sees in a little popup window.
"At First Site" (Score:1)
Interestingly, some may choose to remain blind (Score:2)
I think this carries a larger message: large-scale change - even for the better - is terrifying to people and to those who wield authority or power under the old regime. Even though it seems farfetched, I would not be at all surprised to find out that the blind will be exhorted to remain so by some of their leaders and self-appointed advocates. All in the name of group identity.
Re:Blindness.org: Incompatible for Disabled Use. (Score:1)
The main problem with tables is when they're used to group content in a manner where the context is important and for tabular data. Speech readers will generally just read the info as listed in the HTML and if the order comes out wrong it will be confusing. This is not the case on this article because the order comes out just fine if you ignore the table.
pointless ancedote (off topic?) (Score:1)
The sad thing is that we actually needed these things.
Re:When prosthetic eyes are better... (Score:1)
Re:Implant a receiver, have clip-on alternate sens (Score:1)
Re:Damn! (Score:1)
Re:Don't forget diabetes (OT) (Score:1)
It really isn't. Tiny blood vessels begin growing in the back of the eye, in front of the retina. They are not terribly strong, and, aside from obscuring vision (they're in *front* of the retina now), tend to break off and float around in the eye. Eventually, the 'floaters' obscure vision entirely in the affected eye. Laser treatment can destroy some of these new growths, which can delay blindness.
The *other* mainfestation of retinopathy in diabetics, where the existing blood vessels break open and leak blood into the vitreous humour, is also treatable with laser surgery.
Laser surgery in both cases is little more than triage, preventing blindness temporarily. Both conditions can be temporarily reversed through a surgical process called vitrectomy, where the vitreous humour is extracted and replaced with clear fluid (saline? I can't remember...). The root cause of the blindness is *not* corrected by vitrectomy, however.
The DCCT (diabetes complications and control test) showed that a pattern of low glycosylated hemoglobin (sp?) results (in th 5.5-6.5 range) can delay complications for a significant period of time. But in the end, if the other complications of diabetes don't kill the diabetic first, blindness will probably come a' knockin'.
Re:Dont breed! (Score:1)
Well, no. I'm glad to be here. So is my brother. With this disease, you get more quackery than anything. Everytime I see an opthamoligist, they ALWAYS want a photo of my retina, they ALWAYS want to look in there. It's so exciting for them to see a case of it. One guy sugested that I wear some kind of device to shrink the field of vision in front of me, then look around it when I want to see somthing.
I think you asume that all people have a good understanding of genetics, while you do not. Before my mom there is no family history of it. None. I've talked to leading reasearchers in retinal degeneration about the genitics of it. It's kind of bafeling of why I got it. The disease looks to be X linked recessive. If that is the case, none of my children would be effected with it. Any daughters I that may have would be a carrier. Any sons that I may have would be un-effected. In that case my mom should not be effected. If it is just recesive, then my mom's first husband (my brother's father) and my dad would have to both have the recesive trait. The odds of that with this disease are nill.
I think that the RP has helped me in some ways. There is no way for me to play sports effectivly. I was already intrested in science, and for about a decade, computers. I've probibly devoted more time to computers than I would have. I'd say that it is time well spent, I think that it's fun. I also had some learning disabilities when I was younger, should I not put my children through that? I have an above average inteligence level, and just had trouble learning that I learned to cope with. It becomes a matter of learning to cope. For RP, that means that I look around a lot, rely less on sight to navigate than most people do, and trying to avoid dark situations. I don't think that saying "don't breed" is a good thing. Isn't that what the Nazi's goal was? A master race with no genetic flaws. It'll never work.
I am glad to be here, losing site or not so don't call my mom selfish because I have trouble seeing.
--Josh
Re:How do blind people visualize? (Score:1)
AMD (Score:1)
it has been estimated that as many as 10 million 'boomers' may go blind due to AMD.
So how many will go blind due to Intel?