Special Eye Drops May Reverse Glaucoma Damage

Aug. 5 -- TUESDAY, Aug. 4 (HealthDay News) -- A new type of eye drop appears to protect retinal and optic nerve cells -- and even reverse some sight loss -- in patients battling glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness, new research suggests.

Italian researchers found that the topical use of nerve growth factor, which is easily absorbed by the eye in drop form, spares retinal ganglion cells from nerve damage caused by the build-up of eye pressure associated with glaucoma.

This is "the first evidence that nerve growth factor eye drops may represent a potential treatment for glaucoma," said Dr. Stefano Bonini, professor and chairman of the department of ophthalmology at the University of Rome Campus Bio-Medico.

Bonini and his team reported their findings in the Aug. 3 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Glaucoma is an often symptom-less grouping of incurable, but treatable, eye diseases that cause vision loss and blindness as a result of slowly building damage to the eye's optic nerve, according to the Glaucoma Research Foundation.

Although people of all ages are vulnerable to the disease, the elderly face a particularly high risk. The Glaucoma Research Foundation notes that glaucoma is the second most common cause of blindness worldwide. About 4 million Americans have the disease (about half don't know it), and roughly 120,000 have lost their vision as a result. In sum, glaucoma accounts for roughly 10 percent of all blindness in the United States.

Although current interventions can reduce the troublesome eye pressure associated with glaucoma, thereby slowing its progression, no treatment to date has succeeded in restoring vision lost to the disease.

Exploring ways to do that, the authors observed that nerve growth factor -- a protein found in human tissue -- previously had been shown to be beneficial when treating the brain tissue of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's patients. Because of similarities in development, glaucoma is sometimes called "the ocular Alzheimer's disease," they noted.