Eye Health News and Research

Latest Eye Health News and Research

Study shows older children also benefit from lazy eye treatment

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and 48 eye centers across North America report that many children between the ages of 7 and 17 with amblyopia, or "lazy eye," may benefit from treatments usually prescribed for younger children.

11 Apr 2005

Assessing the function of unknown genes is feasible and can be done with a microarray phenotype

Microarrays provide a method of quantifying the expression and order of genes in a particular genome -- acting as a surrogate measure of cell physiology, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report that appears online today in the journal Nature Genetics.

10 Apr 2005

Make room for daddy, say University of Florida autism experts

Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and is characterized by problems interacting and communicating with others. Caring for an autistic child can be a relentless and labor-intensive task — one that is overwhelmingly performed by mothers, says UF nursing researcher Jennifer Elder.

7 Apr 2005

Level I trauma centers boost head injury survival

Head injury patients transferred to level I trauma centers are more likely to survive than if they're transferred to level II facilities, an Oregon Health & Science University study has found.

7 Apr 2005

DNA packaging linked with cancer

New laboratory findings at the University of Illinois at Chicago suggest that what lies outside cancer cells is at least as important as the genes inside in explaining a tumor's malignancy.

5 Apr 2005

Zinc appears to help boys learn

Seventh graders given 20 mg zinc, five days per week, for 10 to 12 weeks showed improvement in mental performance, responding more quickly and accurately on memory tasks and with more sustained attention, than classmates who received no additional zinc.

4 Apr 2005

More discrimination directed toward obese shoppers than toward average-weight shoppers

Sales clerks tend to subtly discriminate against overweight shoppers but treat them more favorably if they perceive that the individual is trying to lose weight, according to a study by Rice University researchers.

4 Apr 2005

Bionic eyes from Stanford

Stanford physicists and eye doctors have teamed up to design a "bionic eye," of sorts. On Feb. 22 in the Journal of Neural Engineering, Daniel Palanker, Alexander Vankov and Phil Huie from the Department of Ophthalmology and the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory and Stephen Baccus from the Department of Neurobiology published a design of an optoelectronic retinal prosthesis system that can stimulate the retina with resolution corresponding to a visual acuity of 20/80

4 Apr 2005

Light therapy effectively treats mood disorders

A study commissioned by the American Psychiatric Association and led by a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine has found that light therapy effectively treats mood disorders, including seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and other depressive disorders.

4 Apr 2005

Simvastatin linked to protection against endothelial dysfunction in diabetic rats

Almost two years ago, the diabetes arm of the Heart Protection Study, the largest-ever study using a cholesterol-lowering medication, found that diabetics who took a daily dose of the statin drug simvastatin over five years reduced the risk of a first nonlethal heart attack by 37 percent and risk of a first nonfatal or fatal stroke by 24 percent, regardless of their cholesterol or glucose levels.

3 Apr 2005

Political point-scoring over policies to control MRSA confuses real issue

Political point-scoring over policies to control MRSA (meticillin-resistant Staphlococcus aureus) confuses cleanliness with the real failure in UK hospitals - poor hand hygiene and inadequate use of gloves, states an editorial in this week’s issue of The Lancet.

3 Apr 2005

Researchers find that human eyes learn best in an uncluttered setting

If athletes, soldiers and drivers must perform every day in visually messy environments, common sense suggests that any visual training they receive should include distractions and disorder.

30 Mar 2005

CDC experts sent to Angola to help with Marburg epidemic

In an effort to control the Marburg virus outbreak in Angola, Health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta will assist the World Health Organization by going to Angola to help with outbreak investigation, infection control and laboratory diagnosis of the disease.

30 Mar 2005

Solving sleep problems helps epileptic children

Sleeping woes may explain why children with epilepsy are often so hyperactive, say researchers with the University of Florida's Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute.

30 Mar 2005

Avoiding risks of skin cancer from ultraviolet radiation (UVR)

Cancer Research UK has launched the SunSmart Campaign for 2005 and NRPB strongly supports the health promotion messages in the campaign.

30 Mar 2005

Invisible influences reveal unconscious pathways used in visual perception

Our conscious awareness is underpinned by activity in our brain, but there is far more going on in our brain at any one time than we can possibly be aware of. So what aspects of our brain's activity are we actually aware of?

28 Mar 2005

Fish is brain food

Researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) found that a diet high in docosahexenoic acid, or DHA--an omega-3 fatty acid found in relatively high concentrations in cold-water fish--dramatically slowed the progression of Alzheimer's disease in mice.

28 Mar 2005

Promising results reported for HIV patients suffering from facial wasting

Physicians from leading plastic surgery and dermatology practices report positive results from HIV patients participating in a clinical trial of Radiesse synthetic injectable implant on facial wasting. The trial is intended to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of this widely used tissue augmentation therapy as a treatment for the facial changes that socially stigmatize many HIV-infected patients.

23 Mar 2005

Vernier testing could be a substitute for the traditional Snellen eye chart test

Infant vernier acuity is not as immature as previous research has indicated according to a study published in March in the Journal of Vision, an online, free access publication of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO).

22 Mar 2005

Preventing eye disease in retinitis pigmentosa

Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is an inherited eye disease that causes visual disability leading to blindness. Over the last 15 years, researchers have pinpointed defects in dozens of genes causing different forms of RP.

22 Mar 2005