20 hours ago
Hot Off The Press
There are just a couple of articles for you this month, but I hope you find them interesting. Click on the hyperlink for further information.
NICE approved the first NHS Treatment for Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON)
The UK has approved an antioxidant treatment for LHON which is another rare inherited eye disease. LHON is caused by a rare mitochondrial disorder and results in sudden bilateral central blindness, usually in young men. This condition is not to be confused with Lebers Amaurosis. The two diseases were just first described by the same person. “Idebenone” swallowed 3 x a day, supports mitochondrial function, and so thankfully helps preserve some functional vision.
Presbyopia is not an IRD, but happens to nearly all of us, so I thought you would find it interesting. This is what happens in our 40s and 50s, as the lenses in our eyes get stiffer, and we struggle to focus and have to get reading glasses.
The father and son Benozzi researchers in Argentina have been successfully trialling eye dops which seem to greatly lessen the need to go and get glasses at this age. The drops are simply a combination of pilocarpine (constricts the pupil), and diclofenac, (a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug). Using them twice to three times daily improved vision significantly with no serious side effects. Just a bit of eye irritation in some. Many of us will wait to see how the outcome of further trials with bated breath.
A vaccine instead of anti VEGF eye injections?
This is a very exciting discovery for all those who need regular anti VEGF eye injections for their nAMD (neovascular Aged-related Macular Degeneration).
This mRNA vaccine will potentially help your body to do by itself, what the anti VEGF injections currently do, i.e. to treat abnormal new blood vessel formation in the retina. Just one vaccination or maybe with a booster, will potentially work long term instead of the current eye injections, potentially having the same benefit but with a lot less inconvenience. The vaccine is targeted against the protein LRG1 which promotes the new vessel formation. It works fabulously in mice, so let’s hope that it will be just as good in humans.
That’s all for this time folks….
Keep watching this space.
Till next time…
Cathy
Guest writer – Dr Catherine Civil
My name is Dr Catherine Civil. I have been associated with Retina Australia since the early 2000s. At that time, they were called WARPF, or the WA Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation. WARPF were raffling a car in a shopping centre, and it caught my eye because my dad and my uncle both had Retinitis Pigmentosa. Being a doctor and a parent, I had a particular interest and awareness, not just of the disease, but of the fact that there was a significant risk that I or my children or my relatives might have inherited it.
I turned up at an AGM and found myself on the Board and engaged in fundraising. I spent several years on the Board and met some wonderful people, and I was even Chairman for a couple of years. When I left, I started writing the “Hot off the Press” research update column for the newsletter.
I arrived from the UK in the early 1990s with my husband and twin baby girls to live in Perth for a year for a bit of sunshine and fun, and we find ourselves still having fun in WA 30 years later, and with a grown son as well.
