Blind Opticianry Professor Teaches Students about the Blind

"On a recent Monday afternoon, Opticianry Professor Blair Wong told his students to pair up with interns from the Carroll Center for the Blind, who were visiting class that day. For the next 30 minutes, the students were supposed to lead the interns, who were blind, through the narrow hallways of the Ben Franklin Institute of Technology as they went on a tour of the school," starts the Boston.com post. "The dozen or so students stood up and walked over to the adults interns, politely introducing themselves before carefully placing their hands on the interns’ elbows. Wong stood at the front of the room looking down. He would need someone to guide him, too." Read more.

Temporary Blindness from Smartphone Use

"In Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, doctors detailed the cases of the two women, ages 22 and 40, who experienced 'transient smartphone blindness' for months," notes an Associated Press post. "The women complained of recurring episodes of temporary vision loss for up to 15 minutes. They were subjected to variety of medical exams, MRI scans and heart tests. Yet doctors couldn't find anything wrong with them to explain the problem." Read more.

Visual Impairment Skyrockets as Boomers Age

"With the youngest of the baby boomers hitting 65 by 2029, the number of people with visual impairment or blindness in the United States is expected to double to more than 8 million by 2050, according to projections based on the most recent census data and from studies funded by the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. Another 16.4 million Americans are expected to have difficulty seeing due to correctable refractive errors such as myopia (nearsightedness) or hyperopia (farsightedness) that can be fixed with glasses, contacts or surgery." That's the start of a press release from NEI. Approximately, "1 million Americans were legally blind (20/200 vision or worse) in 2015. Having 20/200 vision means that for clear vision, you would have to be 20 feet or closer to an object that a person with normal vision could see from 200 feet away. Meanwhile, 3.2 million Americans had visual impairment in 2015—meaning they had 20/40 or worse vision with best possible correction. Another 8.2 million had vision problems due to uncorrected refractive error."

 The researchers were led by Rohit Varma, M.D., director of the University of Southern California’s Roski Eye Institute, Los Angeles, led the researchers, and JAMA Ophthalmology published the results just this week (May 19th).
Read more.

Sweet Potatoes Combat Vitamin A Deficiency, Leading Cause of Blindness

"Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children. It also increases the risk of disease and death from severe infections, according to the World Health Organization. About 250 million preschool children across the world are vitamin A deficient. Many of these live in Africa and South-Eastern Asia," notes Medical News Today. "Fortunately, vitamin deficiency is preventable....Bio-fortification of sweet potatoes is a promising method to combat vitamin A deficiency in South Africa. The orange-fleshed vegetable already contains high levels of beta-carotene, which our bodies convert to vitamin A. Sweet potatoes are also a staple in the South African diet." Read more.

Blind Use Echolocators and Access the Visual Cortex

"Canadian expert Mel Goodale determines echolocators use echoes to detect multiple properties of objects through areas of the brain associated with vision," writes Medical News Today. "Certain blind individuals have the ability to use echoes from tongue or finger clicks to recognize objects in the distance, and some use echolocation as a replacement for vision. Research done by Dr. Mel Goodale, from the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, and colleagues around the world, is showing that echolocation in blind individuals is a full form of sensory substitution, and that blind echolocation experts recruit regions of the brain normally associated with visual perception when making echo-based assessments of objects. Dr. Goodale's latest results were presented at the 9th Annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting in Vancouver British Columbia." Read more.

Underestimating the Abilities of the Blind

“Using simulation to walk in the shoes of a person who is blind -- such as wearing a blindfold while performing everyday tasks -- has negative effects on people's perceptions of the visually impaired, according to a University of Colorado Boulder study,” reports Science Daily. “’When people think about what it would be like to be blind, they take from their own brief and relatively superficial experience and imagine it would be really, really terrible and that they wouldn't be able to function well,’ said Arielle Silverman, who is lead author of the paper and blind. She conducted the research as part of her doctoral dissertation in CU-Boulder's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and now is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. In one part of the study, after simulating blindness by having their eyes covered, participants believed people who are blind are less capable of work and independent living than did participants who simulated other impairments like amputation, or had no impairment.” Read more.

Loss of Eyesight Has Greatest Impact

"Many Americans across racial and ethnic groups describe losing eyesight as potentially having the greatest impact on their day-to-day life, more so than other conditions including: loss of limb, memory, hearing and speech (57% of African-Americans, 49% of non-Hispanic whites, 43% of Asians and 38% of Hispanics)," reports Medical News Today. "When asked which disease or ailment is the worst that could happen to them, blindness ranked first among African-Americans followed by AIDS/HIV. Hispanics and Asians ranked cancer first and blindness second, while Alzheimer's disease ranked first among non-Hispanic whites followed by blindness. When asked about various possible consequences of vision loss, "quality of life" ranked as the top concern by non-Hispanic whites (73%) and Asians (68%) while African-Americans (66%) and Hispanics (63%) ranked "loss of independence" as number one." Read more.

“New” Drug Protects against Degenerative Blindness

“In a new study led by UC San Francisco (UCSF) scientists, a chemical compound designed to precisely target part of a crucial cellular quality-control network provided significant protection, in rats and mice, against degenerative forms of blindness and diabetes,” reports Science Daily. “In addition to opening a promising drug-development path for the wide range of diseases caused by cell loss, the new research offers a new view of the workings of the unfolded protein response (UPR), a cellular ‘life-or-death’ signaling network: When cells are under stress, the UPR works to ensure that they produce properly configured proteins, but those cells not up to this task are quickly prompted by the UPR to self-destruct.” Read more.

Improve Living Space for Those with Sight Loss

"New guidelines launched by the sight loss charity, Thomas Pocklington Trust and the University of Stirling, reveal how clever design of living spaces can improve the lives of people who are living with two common conditions - dementia and sight loss," according to a Medical News Today post. "The evidence-based guidelines help make homes more accessible for people with both conditions and were developed after researchers gathered the views and experiences of people living with dementia and sight loss, their families and carers and a wide range of professionals." Read more.

For a copy of the research findings, click this Thomas Pocklington Trust link.

Cameras and Contacts Help Blind Navigate

"In two labs some 50 miles apart in Israel, computer scientists and engineers are refining devices that employ tiny cameras as translators of sorts. For both teams, the goal is to give blind people a form of sight — or at least an experience analogous to sight," reports the New York Times. "At Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, where Zeev Zalevsky is head of the electro-optics program, these efforts have taken shape in the form of a smart contact lens. The device begins with a camera mounted on a pair of glasses, and the contact lens, Dr. Zalevsky explained, is embedded with an electrode that will produce an image of what is before the camera directly on the cornea. The image would be experienced in one of two ways: If an apple is placed before the camera, it could be “seen” either as the contour of an apple or as a Braille-like shape that a trained user would recognize as a representation of an apple." Read more.

In Developing Countries, Blindness Down, AMD Up

“Rates of blindness and impaired eyesight have plummeted over the past 20 years in the developed world,” reports Science Daily. “But macular degeneration has replaced cataract as the leading cause of blindness in rich countries, reveals an analysis of the available.” Read more.

Braille-Like CLs for the Blind

"Engineering researchers at Israel’s Bar Ilan University are developing a contact lens for the blind. These special lenses translates images into sensations felt on the eye," reports PSFK.com. "Headed by Professor Zeev Zalevsky, the project has already seen positive results in it’s initial trials and is planning on continuing forward with testing. The system is a fairly complex one. First, the image of an object is taken with a smartphone or camera and is then processed and sent to the contact lens. The lens is custom made, fitted with a series of electrodes that use small electric impulses to mechanically relay shapes onto the cornea, almost like braille. After some practice, test subjects were able to identify specific objects." Read more.

Blind Man and His Service Dog Kicked Off Plane

"A passenger who is blind says he and his service dog were kicked off a plane at Philadelphia International Airport after his dog left his seat," according to NBC's new affiliate in Philadelphia. "He wound up making the journey on the ground instead, joined by other passengers from the plane. The U.S. Airways plane was supposed to take off for Long Island MacArthur Airport around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday but the airline canceled the flight following the incident. Passenger Albert Rizzi, who is from Bellport, N.Y., says he boarded the plane with his service dog Doxology -- 'Doxy' for short -- around 8 p.m. The airline says its policy is that service dogs need to be kept close by the passenger, preferably at their feet." Read more. You can also find more about the story on the ABC affiliate at this site.

This has happened on a previous U.S. Airways flight.

One Step Closer to Curing Blindness? Just Maybe

“Scientists are one step closer to curing blindness, after they carried out the first successful transplant of light-sensitive photoreceptor cells from a synthetic retina that was grown from embryonic stem cells,” reports Medical News Today. “Researchers from University College London (UCL) and Moorfields Eye Hospital in the UK, transplanted the photoreceptor cells in to night-blind mice and found that the cells developed normally. The cells integrated into the existing retina in the mice and formed the required nerve connections that transmit visual information to the brain. The study, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, shows embryonic stem cells could potentially be used to provide an ‘unlimited supply of healthy photoreceptors for retinal cell transplantations to treat blindness in humans.’” Read more.

Two New Therapies Could Wipe Out Inherited Disorders Causing Blindness

“Researchers have discovered that using two kinds of therapy in tandem may be a knockout combo against inherited disorders that cause blindness. While their study focused on man's best friend, the treatment could help restore vision in people, too,” according to a post on Science Daily. “Published in the journal Molecular Therapy, the study builds on earlier work by Michigan State University veterinary ophthalmologist András Komáromy and colleagues. In 2010, they restored day vision in dogs suffering from achromatopsia, an inherited form of total color blindness, by replacing the mutant gene associated with the condition.” Read more.

Visual Impairment Declining in Germany

"The numbers of people in Germany who are blind or visually impaired is going down. Robert P. Finger and his co-authors present their findings in the current edition of Deutsches Arzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109[27/28]: 484-9)," says Medical News Today. "The aging of the population would lead one to expect an increase in the numbers of blind and visually impaired - for in most cases the main reason for loss of vision is an age-related disease. Rates of macular degeneration, for example, and diabetes-related eye disease both go up with age. At the same time, however, the numbers of cases in which glaucoma or optic nerve atrophy results in blindness are going down. Retinal detachment, too, is occurring less frequently." Read more.

Childhood Obesity Can Lead to Blindness

"Children who are overweight or obese -- particularly older, non-Hispanic white girls -- are more likely to have a neurological disorder known as idiopathic intracranial hypertension, a rare condition that can result in blindness, according to a new Kaiser Permanente study published in The Journal of Pediatrics," according to a post on Medical News Today. "In a cross-sectional, population-based study of 900,000 children ages 2-19 years old, researchers found 78 cases of pediatric idiopathic intracranial hypertension. The condition occurred most frequently in overweight or obese, non-Hispanic white teenage girls - 85 percent of the children with IIH were girls 11-19, nearly half were non-Hispanic white, and 73 percent were overweight or obese." Read more.