How eye health is influenced by overall health
Eye health is influenced by overall health. Mark Blumenkranz, MD, an ophthalmologist and Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at Stanford University, discusses the connection.
Transcript
People speak of the eye as a window into the body. And so, to the extent that people engage in unhealthy behaviors or fail
to correct easily correctable medical abnormalities-- [MUSIC PLAYING]
The leading cause of blindness is macular degeneration. And the wet form responds extremely well.
95% of patients respond to anti-VEGF therapy. We've made enormous, enormous strides
in macular degeneration in the last 8 to 10 years,
just breathtaking. As I said, I think we've really moved from those being irreversible, universally blinding diseases,
to being very treatable. What we'd like to do is eventually avoid the need to ever have to operate on anyone and for anyone
to even develop the disease. That's the gold standard, is to essentially engage in preventive medicine.
And some drugs will get us there. The first thing we tell people is just to get healthy. Lose weight. Make sure that your sugars are as normal as they can be.
Make sure your blood pressure is normal. And don't smoke cigarettes. And if people do those three things, the risk of vision loss
later in life goes down dramatically. I think the things that are really exciting in ophthalmology-- in a way, the eye is an especially rich and ripe target
for laser therapy. And the reason is that the eye is designed for there to be light transmission of images to the back of the eye
and for them to be converted, essentially, into vision by traveling to the brain. So because the eye is so optimized
for light transmission and because lasers are all about light transmission, the eye is the ideal target to use lasers.
And lasers are orders of magnitude safer than they used to be. We now have the so-called ANSI standards, American National
Safety Institute, that specify how much power, how much energy a laser can have, which wavelength it
is. What we're seeing with lasers now is increased precision and safety. Classic gene therapy is pretty straightforward.
It's been around. I mean, we've understood it for a long time. And that is the idea that you identify a gene that's defective.
Presumably, it produces either a defective protein or it doesn't secrete a protein at all, and patients
develop very severe diseases. So retinitis pigmentosa, which oftentimes leads to blindness-- especially the more severe cases--
in the teenage years, 20s, or 30s, the idea that you could identify that gene and replace that gene, that's been the holy grail.
eye health
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