News by Subject Medicine & Health

IBS biologists find an explanation for the increase in intraocular pressure in glaucoma and a promising therapeutic option to rejuvenate the eye.

There is a broad collection of anomalies now known as congenital Zika syndrome (CZS). Some of the most serious are ophthalmologic. Two papers published in the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus (AAPOS) evaluated visual function among infants with suspected and confirmed CZS. Both studies found that while about 40 percent of patients had ocular abnormalities, 100 percent of children tested had visual impairment. Thus, cortical visual impairment might be the most common cause of blindness among children with CZS.

Researchers at the Helmholtz Zentrum München have developed a new method for reconstructing continuous biological processes, such as disease progression, using image data. The study was published in 'Nature Communications'.

Dr. Wolf M. Harmening from University Eye Hospital Bonn, together with American colleagues, studied color vision by probing individual sensory cells in the human eye. The results confirm that the photoreceptor cells of the retina are especially sensitive to colors corresponding to their visual pigments, even when stimulated in isolation. A new observation is that proximity effects play a key role: sensitivity varied depending on which cell classes were located in the immediate neighborhood.

In an effort to explore ways to improve clinical observation skills among medical students, researchers from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in collaboration with educators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, published a study in Ophthalmology that found significant improvement in observational recognition skills among students who took an art observation course and demonstrated that art training could help teach medical students to become better clinical observers.