I can write, and you can see my words with your two beautiful eyes; isn’t it a miracle in its way? Yes, it is, and we are gifted with the vision to experience the good and the unfortunate all around us with the memories to go forward and tell the tale to people we meet in the future.
Losing the ability to see could make someone disheartening and fearful; the mere thought could be haunting. But it is the living reality of many all across the world, and they are surviving with it and counting days to make merry in the hope that someday their darkness is glorified with the light of vision.
It’s World Braille Day today, which symbolizes a blind person’s way of reading and studying things. The day puts forward more than just the reading and writing abilities of a blind person and the hope that how far away or close is a way out for vision loss in many individuals who hope to regain the light of their eyes.
World Health Organization (WHO) states that the estimated figure of visually impaired people is 285 million worldwide, among which 39 million are completely blind, and the other 246 million have low vision. Expert has put out their word that people age and gradually begin losing their sight naturally or due to a prevailing health condition affecting the eyesight.
But there 20 percent of these retinal degenerations disorder does not have any cure developed till now. Let’s look into some of the vision-impairing conditions differentiated as a curable and noncurable vision-impairing disease.
The curable and The uncurable
Among several diseases related to vision impairment and gradual loss of eyesight, 80 percent of disorders are easily cured with the treatments available for them. There are mainly two kinds of vision disorders observed for which treatments have been developed; uncorrected refractive errors, which involves three subcategories underneath it:
- myopia (short-sightedness)
- hyperopia (far-sightedness)
- astigmatism (blurred vision due to not proper curve shape of the Cornea)
The other curable vision disorder involves Cataracts, which is the cloudy formation in front of the lenses. The uncorrected refractive errors are cured with either refractive surgery or corrected with glasses or contact lenses depending on the short or far-sightedness in a person. In the case of cataracts, the doctor goes with surgical processes for a person.
But when it comes to the remaining 20 percent, the vision impairment leads to the gradual loss of vision when it turns severe, making a person blind effectively. These kinds of vision impairment with no precise cure to treat them are known as Retinal degeneration disorders.
Retinal Degeneration Disorders is a given term to many vision impairment diseases for which no cure has yet been developed. Some of them include; Usher Syndrome and Retinitis Pigmentosa. All these ultimately lead to killing all the tissues in the cell present at the back of our eyes and are responsible for detecting light.
Moreover, most cases where a person goes blind are due to muscular degeneration caused by growing age. But one of the experts has mentioned that doctors and various healthcare scientists might find the cure for retinal degeneration disorder difficult because hundreds and thousands of “biochemical abnormalities underlie in these disorders.”
The expert Dr. Raymond Iezzi, an ophthalmology consultant with the Mayo Clinic, told Medical News Today that,
while there are several patterns of retinal degeneration, each is treated differently depending on the cells affected as well as the stage and severity of their degeneration. There are variety of conditions related to retinal pigmentosa that affect different areas differently.
Since there is a different mechanism by which the retina is affected, the initial attempt requires protecting the retina cells from dying, which is the consequence of the biochemical disorder. The protection would need, as they say, “robust neuroprotection strategy for prevention of vision loss in individuals.
Experts believe that fixing the vision loss would require gene therapy that would improve the biochemical abnormalities first, eventually leading to retina cells’ death.
But one of the experts has mentioned that stem cells could be used to build new retinal pigmented epithelial cells taken from a person’s tissue samples and transplanted. It helps in once again absorbing the light and keeping the retinal cells nourished.
As Medical News Today explains the mechanisms of these stem cells in the retina, it goes like;
There are two types of photoreceptive cells in the retina – rod cells and cone cells. While rod cells are stimulated by light over a wide range of intensities, perceiving shape, size and brightness, it is the cone cells that perceive color and fine detail.
Researchers have successfully derived the rod cells from the embryonic stem cell, and deriving the cone cell is still in process. When both these cells are being derived, it would be translated in a mouse model to check the success rate of this whole procedure in retrieving the vision, and hence, it would then be applied and tested in a human trial.
The entire mouse model has been used to validate the embryonic stem cell mechanism for retaining vision because experts believe that deriving rode and cone cells could be complicated. If it is successfully derived, it will show successful regenerative results.
However, it does not seem so simple at the end because the stem cells which have been transplanted would again be sensitive to retinal degenerative disorders similar to the ones which already died if the cells have not been put in neuroprotection. The result lies in gene therapy, aiming to find out what is causing the cells to die.
What can you do for your eye health?
Retinal Degenerative Disorder could harm any person at any particular time, and it begins from minor vision impairment which, if taken care of properly, could be prevented in proper time. One must do the following to keep in check their eye health, which is equally important to other parts of the body.
- Try to restrict smoking as it can majorly damage the optic nerve and has been known for causing the maximum cases related to cataracts in people.
- Please wash your hands and eyes when coming from outside as it is equally important to keep them clean and preventing any infection. If one wears lenses, it is necessary to clean those with the proper solution available in the market.
- Keep in the list those diet and food items that emphasize the health of your vision.
- Go for eye examination whenever you find time because professional opinion ad diagnosis equally matters.
Visually impaired eyes do have hope in the future when blind people would be able to retrieve their vision and fill their life with light. This world Braille Day, let us promise ourselves better eye health because as strong as one might become after losing their sight and heighten their other senses, it indeed is discouraging and disheartening in every possible way.
Let’s keep our eye health as a priority and the health checkup of other parts of the body because vision is the world.
