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Blindness can be an incredibly devastating impairment, affecting practically every single aspect of one’s life. However, scientists have found a way to restore the sight of select cases of blindness via surgery. Specifically, the researchers are able to restore the sight of patients who became legally blind after a traumatic head injury.
Head trauma is an escalating medical issue in the United States, with over 2.5 million cases recorded by the Center for Diseases Control in 2010, Futurism reports. Of those millions of patients that suffer head trauma, every single one was at risk of developing a case of blindness, or at least some level of vision impairment.
The discovery was made thanks to the collaboration of three universities, namely; St. Louis’ Washington University School of Medicine, Wayne State University’s Kresge Eye Institute, and India’s L.V. Prasad Eye Institute. The group published their findings in the journal Ophthalmology.
With the participation of 20 legally blind patients, the researchers used vitrectomy, which is a type of surgery used to treat Terson syndrome. This is a hemorrhage case that’s typically caused by head trauma. Some of the patients suffered Terson syndrome in both eyes, which proved extremely useful during the study.
Once the surgery is done, it took only one month for the patients to experience a noticeable improvement in their vision, with some going from 20/1290 vision to 20/40, Business Insider reports. After several months passed, practically all of the participants had their vision restored to a perfect 20/20.
Even more astonishing is the fact that some of the patients were already legally blind before experiencing head trauma. After going through the procedure, their vision improved significantly.
Finally, the researchers learned that waiting longer for the head trauma to heal before undergoing the surgery did not seem to have any effects on the results. This is an important and surprising discovery since it means that victims of head trauma won’t have to worry about permanently losing their vision if they wait for months or even years.
