Blindness

Being prescribed semaglutide for diabetes or weight management is associated with an increased risk, up to seven times, of developing a relatively rare form of untreatable blindness, sometimes referred to as an 'eye stroke,' a new study has found.

CRISPR gene-editing has improved the vision of patients with a form of blindness in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial. The results give new hope to patients with the condition, and show that CRISPR could be put to use in humans to treat a range of conditions.

Neuroscientists have shown that blind people recognize basic faces using the same brain regions as sighted people – even if the face shapes are delivered as audio rather than through the visual cortex – in an interesting look into neuroplasticity.

While seeing-eye dogs can be very helpful to the blind, raising and training them is a long and expensive process. Scientists have therefore recently started investigating the possibility of outsourcing the job to dog-like quadruped robots.

If you don't like getting needles in the arm, imagine getting them in your eyes. That's what people with wet age-related macular degeneration have to do, but thanks to new research, those injections may soon be replaced by painless eyedrops.

Researchers have used 3D nanotechnology to successfully grow human retinal cells, opening the door to a new way of treating age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the developed world.

The largest-ever global genetic study of glaucoma has uncovered more genes associated with the disease, including never-before-identified genes that could be targeted to prevent the optic nerve damage that leads to irreversible blindness.

Using a refined version of the CRISPR gene-editing tool, researchers have restored vision in mice with retinitis pigmentosa. The results may open the door for treatments for the one in 5,000 humans afflicted with the blindness-inducing condition.

It can be difficult for blind people to learn to read braille, as they don't have any way of seeing which character the dots that they're feeling represent. That's where the BrailleWear glove comes in, as it verbally tells them.

One of the leading causes of blindness, age-related macular degeneration causes the center of an older person's vision to become blurry or even completely absent. Arges glasses are designed to help, by relocating the unseen images.

Scientists have grown mini eyes from human cells in the lab. These eye organoids provide good models of the real thing to help scientists study diseases that cause blindness and potentially find treatments.

A cornea implant made out of collagen gathered from pig skin has restored the vision of volunteers in a landmark study. Pending further testing, the novel implant is hoped to improve the vision of millions waiting for difficult transplant surgeries.