Soon, retinal scans may be able to predict heart attacks. New research has found that decreased complexity in the blood vessels at the back of the retina in the human eye is an early biomarker for myocardial infarction.

“For decades, I’ve always lectured that the eye is not just the window to the soul, but the window to the brain and the window to the body as well,” said ophthalmologist Dr. Howard R. Krauss,

Cardiologist Dr. Rigved Tadwalkar, who was not involved in the research, said that the findings were interesting. “[A]lthough we have known that examination of retinal vasculature can produce insights on cardiovascular health, this study contributes to the evidence base that characteristics of the retinal vasculature can be used for individual risk prediction for myocardial infarction,” he said.

“The greatest appeal,” underlined Dr. Krauss, who was also not involved in the study, “is that the photography station may be remote to the clinician, and perhaps, someday, even accessible via a smartphone.”

According to a press release, the project utilized data from the UK Biobank, which contains demographic, epidemiological, clinical, and genotyping data, as well as retinal images, for more than 500,000 individuals. Under demographic data, the data included individuals’ age, sex, smoking habits, systolic blood pressure, and body-mass index (BMI). The researchers identified about 38,000 white-British participants, whose retinas had been scanned and who later had heart attacks. The biobank provided retinal fundus images and genotyping information for these individuals.

At the back of the retina, on either side where it connects to the optic nerve, are two large systems of blood vessels, or vasculature. In a healthy individual, each resembles a tree branch, with similarly complex fractal geometry. For some people, however, this complexity is largely absent, and branching is greatly simplified. In this research, an artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning model revealed a connection between low retinal vascular complexity and coronary artery disease.

The research was presented on June 12 at the European Society of Human Genetics.

Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/

Scientists have found a new way to regenerate damaged optic nerve cells taken from mice and grown in a dish. This exciting development could lead to potential eye disease treatments in the future. Damage to full-grown nerve cells causes irreversible and life-altering consequences, because once nerve fibres mature, they lose their ability to regenerate after injury or disease. The new experiments show how activating part of a nerve cell’s regenerative machinery, a protein known as protrudin, could stimulate nerves in the eye to regrow after injury.

With more research, the achievement is a step towards future treatments for glaucoma, a group of eye diseases which cause vision loss by damaging the optic nerve (that links the eye to the brain).

“What we’ve seen is the strongest regeneration of any technique we’ve used before,” said ophthalmologist Keith Martin from the University of Melbourne in Australia. “In the past it seemed impossible we would be able to regenerate the optic nerve but this research shows the potential of gene therapy to do this.”

In this study, scientists stimulated nerve cells of the eye to produce more protrudin, to see if this would help protect the cells from damage and even repair after injury. First, in optical nerve cells cultured in a dish, the researchers showed that ramping up protrudin production stimulated regeneration of nerve cells that had been cut by a laser. Their spindly axons regenerated over longer distances, and in less time, than untreated cells.  Next, adult mice were administered gene therapy – an injection straight into the eye – carrying instructions for nerve cells to bump up protrudin production. As painful as that sounds, this procedure can actually be done safely in people (the injection, that is, not yet the gene therapy).

A few weeks and one optic nerve injury later, these mice had more surviving nerve cells in their retinas than the control group did. In one final experiment, the scientists used whole retinas from mice removed two weeks after giving them a protrudin boost, to see if this treatment could prevent nerve cells from dying in the first place. The researchers found, three days later, that stimulating protrudin production had been almost “entirely neuroprotective, with these retinas exhibiting no loss of [retinal] neurons,” the researchers wrote in their paper. Usually, about half of retinal neurons removed in this way die within a couple of days.

“Our strategy relies on using gene therapy – an approach already in clinical use – to deliver protrudin into the eye,” said Veselina Petrova, a neuroscience student at the University of Cambridge. “It’s possible our treatment could be further developed as a way of protecting retinal neurons from death, as well as stimulating their axons to regrow.”

Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/