vision impairment Archives - Amazing Health Advances

LASIK: What You Need to Know

The AHA! Team — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 05:04:15 +0000

Kourtney H. Houser, MD via Duke Health – Chances are, you know someone who has had LASIK surgery, or you may have considered the procedure yourself. Despite the allure of ditching daily eyewear, the decision to undergo this elective surgery is one most people understandably deliberate on for quite a while. Here, Duke corneal specialist Kourtney Houser. MD, explains what you need to know if you are considering LASIK surgery. Is LASIK as quick, easy, and painless as it’s sometimes described? Make no mistake — LASIK is surgery, and anyone who implies otherwise is not forthcoming. The surgeon creates a flap in the cornea, and a laser is used to reshape the underlying cornea. The surgery takes less than ten minutes, and patients feel pressure but no pain. However, that does not mean it is a simple procedure that just anyone can perform. Like any surgery, the experience of the surgeon is the most important factor in achieving the best results. What factors are important when considering LASIK? In addition to the surgeon’s experience, several elements are crucial to success with LASIK surgery. It starts with a thorough preoperative exam by a qualified surgeon and staff to ensure you are a good candidate. The quality of the surgical tools, such as the laser used, is also very important. We believe that having dedicated, on-site laser machines in a controlled operating room environment, where temperature and humidity are constantly monitored, contributes to better outcomes in our patients. We also have two different excimer laser platforms so that we can customize the procedure to each patient’s eye measurements and ensure the best vision possible. What complications are possible, and how common are they? Any eye procedure has a risk of vision loss, infection, or scarring, but thankfully this is very rare with LASIK. We actually think that the infection risk is less than that with contact lens wear over a patient’s lifetime, based on some reviews. Other risks include needing a second procedure, worsened dry eye, and development of pain or discomfort in the eyes, but most of these can be avoided by appropriate and in-depth pre-operative screening. Our rate of complications is extremely low, with the majority of them occurring less than 1% of the time. Our rates of enhancement (the need for additional laser adjustments) are under 2%. Who is not a good candidate for LASIK? Good question. There are people who are not candidates for LASIK surgery. In fact, I generally turn down roughly 20% of the prospective patients who come in for an evaluation. Some of the more common reasons include high refractive errors (nearsightedness or farsightedness), dry eyes, thin or abnormally shaped corneas, cataracts, and retinal problems from diabetes. The good news is that if you do not qualify for LASIK, Duke offers an array of alternative surgical procedures, such as PRK, phakic intraocular lenses, and cataract surgery with presbyopia- or astigmatism-correcting intraocular lenses. How long do improvements last? Improvements typically last a lifetime, though there can be some slight regression with time depending on your prescription. Also, most patients will develop a need for reading glasses as they reach their 40s and 50s–and while this doesn’t signify the LASIK “not working” anymore, it does usually require patients to wear glasses for some near tasks. What’s the bottom line when considering LASIK? LASIK is not for everybody, but those who are good candidates can experience a life-changing experience–independence from glasses or contact lenses and the freedom to see without correction for many years. As with any surgery, people should do their homework beforehand and choose a surgeon and facility in which they have confidence. To read the original article click here.

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Improving Vision with At-Home Brain Exercises

The AHA! Team — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:08:57 +0000

John Jeffay via Israel21c – RevitalVision offers a unique intervention for people with eyesight challenges, treating the brain where images are processed. Doctors told Amit Azulay again and again that she’d never be able to drive because of medical conditions affecting her eyesight. She proved them wrong — using a unique piece of software developed by a startup in Israel that has been clinically proven to improve vision. Despite suffering nystagmus (involuntary eye movements) and albinism, her eyesight became good enough to apply for a license (see her delighted response to the news here). Amit, aged 25, is one of many patients who say the online training exercises have literally changed their lives. RevitalVision offers a unique intervention for people with eyesight challenges. It doesn’t treat the eye. It treats the brain. The eye is the hardware, providing the best optical signal it can. But in many cases, the brain struggles to process that signal. That could be because of medical conditions including diabetes, glaucoma or AMD (age-related macular degeneration). It could be a cataract patient whose hardware has been upgraded (cloudy lenses replaced with clear ones) but whose software (the brain) hasn’t caught up. Or somebody who’s had laser surgery but now has blurry vision resulting from reduced contrast sensitivity and still has to wear glasses. Or somebody with “lazy eye” (amblyopia) whose brain sidelines signals from the eye that doesn’t work as well as the other. Or somebody who’s borderline for wearing glasses and would prefer not to. RevitalVision addresses all these problems, and more, with a structured program that trains the brain to better make sense of the blurry signals it receives. Screams of joy RevitalVision’s program typically involves three half-hour, at-home computer sessions per week for two or three months. Patients are trained via a dedicated app. The result, says Yair Yahav, the company’s CEO, is a measurable improvement in vision of 20% to 25%, equivalent to an extra two or more lines on a standard eye chart or, in many cases, the difference between a driving license and no license. “Some patients come to our premises in Modi’in [central Israel], where we have a team of optometrists,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “About once a week I hear screams of joy from a patient in another room who now has good enough vision to qualify for a driving license. We have people who are literally crying. “They’ve been told their whole life that there’s no way, forget it, you’ll never be able to drive. “Then they come to us and if they’re missing just one or two lines [on the eye chart], that’s the average, we tell them they have an 85% to 90% chance of success.” One patient testimonial is from a woman who couldn’t read the label on her medicine, or see well enough to sign a check. She now can. Another, a graduate student with congenital nystagmus, always had to sit at the front of the class to read the board. Now she can sit anywhere. “It’s really lifechanging for many, many people,” says Yahav. Image processing He explains the science behind what they do. “The quality of the image we see depends both on image capturing and image processing,” he says. “We don’t treat the lens of the eye; we treat the brain by enhancing its ability to process visual information, which results in significant vision improvement.” The brain training is based on a “Gabor patch,” which looks like a grid of blurry black and white stripes on a gray background. It was invented by Dennis Gabor, who was born in Hungary, fled the Holocaust, invented holography, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1971. His seemingly simple image perfectly matches the shape of the receptive fields of neurons, or nerve cells, in the part of the brain that processes visual information. Repeatedly stimulating those neurons improves their performance, just like physical exercise at the gym builds muscle, says Yahav. Shoring up weaknesses RevitalVision uses an algorithm to understand exactly where the weaknesses lie for each patient. In a typical on-screen exercise, the patient sees three images pop up, two of a Gabor patch and one of a blank. They have to click, using their computer’s mouse, to indicate which is which. The exercises get harder and harder, with the Gabor patch appearing less clear or further toward the edge of the patient’s field of vision. All the time, the algorithm is assessing responses and adjusting the images it displays accordingly. “Our software maps the patient’s cortical deficits, neurons that do not respond well. Then the algorithm tailors specific stimulation to match those deficits,” says Yahav. “Once the patient is consistently answering correctly, the software knows that’s the exact threshold, the maximum vision of the patient in this exercise, and moves on to the next one. “We are training the neurons to be more responsive and restoring the basic mechanism of visual processing in the brain,” he says. FDA approved Yahav says RevitalVision has “the only regulated product approved by the FDA with clinical claims to improve vision for a variety of eye diseases and impairments.” Some products approved to treat amblyopia, he says, are not for those over the age of nine. RevitalVision builds on pre-Internet technology developed in Israel, which it acquired from another company. This technology was launched commercially two years ago as a web-based product available by direct purchase or through an eyecare specialist. So far, the company’s product has treated 15,000 patients. “We’ve raised $7 million so far and we’re raising another $6 million. Now we are scaling up,” says Yahav. The company received a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority during its product development stage, and is conducting trials at Shamir Medical Center associated with Tel Aviv University. It currently employs six people in Israel, six in India and one in the UK. The potential market is so huge that the biggest challenge right now is to spread the word, says Yahav. For more information, click here. To read the original article click here.

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Vision Impairment Is Associated With Mortality

AHA Publisher — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 07:00:08 +0000

Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan via EurekAlert – The global population is aging, and so are their eyes. In fact, the number of people with vision impairment and blindness is expected to more than double over the next 30 years. A meta-analysis in The Lancet Global Health, consisting of 48,000 people from 17 studies, found that those with more severe vision impairment had a higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to those that had normal vision or mild vision impairment. According to the data, the risk of mortality was 29% higher for participants with mild vision impairment, compared to normal vision. The risk increases to 89% among those with severe vision impairment. Importantly, four of five cases of vision impairment can be prevented or corrected. Globally, the leading causes of vision loss and blindness are both avoidable: cataract and the unmet need for glasses. The study’s lead author, Joshua Ehrlich, M.D., M.P.H., sought to better understand the association between visual disabilities and all-cause mortality. The work compliments some of Ehrlich’s recent research, also in The Lancet Global Health Commission on Global Eye Health, that highlighted the impact of late-life vision impairment on health and well-being, including its influence on dementia, depression, and loss of independence. “It’s important these issues are addressed early on because losing your vision affects more than just how you see the world; it affects your experience of the world and your life,” says Ehrlich. “This analysis provides an important opportunity to promote not only health and wellbeing, but also longevity by correcting, rehabilitating, and preventing avoidable vision loss across the globe.” To read the original article click here.

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