Resveratrol Acts to Prevent Blindness
Washington University School of Medicine has just completed a study of blindness brought on by macular degeneration due to aging. The study is being published by the American Journal of Pathology. Research found that a natural compound in red wine, grapes, peanuts and blueberries can prevent blindness. The research team found resveratrol acts to stop the development of unnatural blood vessels in the eye. Unnatural blood vessels or as it is called vascular proliferation has a major role, in the creation of eye disease, and this includes age-related macular degeneration. The loss of central vision is caused by macular degeneration.
A tiny circle in the middle of the retina is the macula. It is a light sensitive membrane lining the inside and back of the eye. As we age, the macula will degenerate and it is not known why this happens. Women suffer macular degeneration more than men. In Canada, macular degeneration is the major cause of legal blindness and accounts for 34% of the total cases of blindness.
There are two distinct types of macular degeneration; wet and dry macular degeneration. Dry degeneration accounts for the majority of afflicted patients and accounts for roughly 90% of the reported patients. When an eye is afflicted with dry macular degeneration, the retina tissue shrinks and pigments accumulate inside the retina. The dry form of macular degeneration can change to the wet form.
New blood vessels grow behind and in the macula. Bleeding can occur in or in back of the macula. The retina can have material seep out and settle down on the macula; this condition is called exudate. This can disappear after a period of time and a scar will mark the location of the exudate before it was removed or disappeared. It is generally believed that all people with wet macular degeneration had dry macular degeneration first.
Two different studies concentrated on aging and overweight subjects. It is known that as we age our bodies lose the effect of insulin, and this accounts for seniors gaining weight and developing insulin resistance. This causes the muscles and other tissues to no longer accept insulin and use glucose to generate energy in the mitochondria. This is a condition known as insulin resistance and it is one of the first steps to diabetes. In the clinical human trial, the subjects were an average age of seventy-two years old. Researchers found that resveratrol improved the tissue response to insulin. Jill Crandall, an endocrinologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City went on to say the benefits of resveratrol are unproven, but this is a point I agree with and yet disagree. We need more human clinical trials to establish the true facts about resveratrol and I believe the clinical trials are starting to take place.
Crandall said that they do not know how resveratrol can be affecting the tissues in the body to boost the response of insulin. They did find resveratrol works through an unknown mechanism to halt harmful blood vessel growth in the retina.
A new animal study using mice that had their eyes injured with a laser found resveratrol was able to stop blood vessel growth even when the scientist inactivated the sirtuin proteins. This made it clear resveratrol’s effect on blood-vessel growth had to be through another pathway. They discovered the pathway to be a biological process involving a protein known as elongation factor-2 kinase. Rajendra Apte, a retinal surgeon at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis headed the study.
Earlier studies had questioned how resveratrol could do its work and not use sirtuins. Apte’s study has provided the first real evidence resveratrol can proceed forward through several pathways to improve a patient’s health. The big test for Apte’s data will be clinical trials that could lead to resveratrol being used with current technology to block advanced stages of macular degeneration. Jerry Niederkorn, ocular immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas who was not involved in any of the above research, believes resveratrol could deliver a one-two punch in health care treatment.
Research investigating diabetic retinopathy has been found to cause a vision loss of 20% in diabetic patients and here in the United States we have some 24 million people with diabetes.
This is a report on how resveratrol is generating new data that hopefully will lead to more detailed research in clinical trials, and one day resveratrol will be used to prevent retinal disease.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a Doctor and do not give medical advice; this is a news report and cannot substitute for the advice of a medical professional.
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