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Des Moines Register, October 4, 2000, p. 1B
John Carlson's I O W A
U of I tackles macular degeneration prevention
Iowa City, IA -- The dad picked up the Sunday paper, squinted, and tried to make out the ball scores.
"I can't read this," he told the son.
And that was pretty much the end of life as the dad had known it.
No more trips downtown in the little red pickup for coffee with his pals. No more watching his beloved Cubs on television or dropping a mallard with his .16-gauge on a fine November morning.
"Guess I'm not much good for anything," the dad said. "I can't see anymore."
His vision was pretty much gone, and it seemed to happen overnight. The doctor, a highly respected ophthalmologist, said it was because of something called macular degeneration.
Blood vessels behind the retina had broken and scarred, creating a blind spot in the center of his field of vision. The doctor was sorry. There was nothing to be done.
That was a decade ago. And the unhappy fact is, there is still no proven way to restore the sight of the vast majority of people who have lost their vision to age-related macular degeneration.
Want to know what it's like to have advanced macular degeneration? Look about a foot to the right of a clock on the wall and focus. You know the second hand is moving. You can pick out the clock's color and probably its shape. You simply can't tell the time.
It's a frustrating and frightening thing for millions of people and is the leading cause of blindness in the developed world.
In most instances, it comes with age. With a rapidly aging population, and with people living longer, the condition will become a true crisis over the next 20 years and beyond.
Which brings us to a group of laboratories scattered around the University of Iowa campus. Patients who come to the huge hospital's eye clinic don’t visit these places. Few people do.
This is where 14 doctors and more than 100 staffers and assistants are trying to find a way to prevent macular degeneration in future generations.
When that success comes -- and it surely will -- it's as likely as not to come from this place in Iowa City.
Don’t believe it? A year ago, lab technicians here working with 25,000 blood samples from around the world, isolated a human gene and traced the disease to a common ancestor -- an unknown person who lived 1,000 years before the birth of Christ.
It doesn't mean there's a cure. Yet. It means these people in Iowa City found a very big piece of the puzzle.
"We
want to be able to come up with something to give to people when they’re
35, to keep them from getting this thing," said Dr. Edwin Stone, head
of the U of I's Center for Macular Degeneration.
So the doctors and their assistants are looking for a way to identify people with a predisposition to macular degeneration. Locating the 3,000-year-old ancestor was a huge step.
With that information, they're working to find out what's "broken," what's wrong, why the gene brings about the problem. They will study the disease's development in mice, come up with treatments and hopefully, come up with a drug that will prevent macular degeneration.
That is years away, and what Stone wants people to understand is that life doesn't come to an end when the disease hits.
"I tell patients they have this thing, and yes, in them, it has progressed to the point their life will change. But I've got good news. There are devices they can use to help them read that letter from their grandchildren and read the ball scores in the paper and even watch television."
There are ways to adjust and cope, he tells them.
"It drives me crazy when a doctor tells a patient, 'You have it, you’re legally blind, there's nothing I can do for you. There is no treatment.' That's not true. There are things to be done. Life isn’t over. You're not being stricken down by God. You've had a psychological blow, but you’re going to be OK."
So the clinic here can't cure. It can help. The work goes on in the lab. Somewhere here, is the next step to an answer.
These researchers couldn't keep the disease from blinding the dad.
Now, they give the son and his generation hope.
Contact
To contact the University of Iowa Center for macular degeneration, call (319)384-9270.
John Carlson can be reached at (515)284-8204 or carlsonj@news.dmreg.com
Reprinted from the Des Moines Register, October 4, 2000, p. 1B, with permission from John Carlson. All rights reserved.
