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Glaucoma starts in the brain, not the eye | Blindness from glaucoma starts with an injury in the brain, not the eye, researchers have claimed. According to a team, headed by David Calkins, director of research at Vanderbilt University's Eye Institute, the disease - the
leading cause of irreversible blindness - shows up first in the brain, not the
eye. The researchers made the discovery after injecting glaucoma-afflicted rodents
with a special fluorescent dye that illuminated sections of the middle of the
brain where the optic nerve forms its first connections, reports Discovery News.
After analyses, boffins found that the disease's first signs were not in the retina.
Instead, it turned that out the earliest damage was at the other end of the optic
nerve, in the mid-brain, which lost its ability to receive information from optic
nerve fibers. The optic nerve is a cable that connects the retina, the light-sensitive
tissue lining the inner surface of the eye, with the brain. "It's a very interesting
study," Darrell WuDunn, residency program director of the Department of Ophthalmology
at Indiana University School of Medicine, told Discovery News. "It does have potentially
profound implications for treatment, and even diagnosis, of glaucoma, if it holds
true for humans." "This study shows that the deficits start in the brain, not
the eye," WuDunn said. The research was published in the March 1 issue of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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