introduction: in 1995, the world health organization (who) estimated that there were 37.1 million blind people worldwide. it has subsequently been reported that 110 million people have severely impaired vision, hence are at great risk of becoming blind. watkins predicted an annual increase of about two million blind worldwide. this study was designed to investigate the causes of blindness and l...

A patient presented with unilateral findings of night blindness shown by impaired rod function and dark adaptation, constricted visual fields with good central acuity, a barely recordable electro-retinographic b-wave, and a unilaterally impaired electro-oculogram. There were none of the pigmentary changes usually associated with retinitis pigmentosa. The unaffected right eye was normal in all r...

Stiles-Crawford functions were obtained from the maculas of 22 patients with different genetic types of retinitis pigmentosa and visual acuity of 20/40 or better. Reduced cone directional sensitivity was seen in the fovea with both focal cone electroretinographic testing and psychophysical testing. Functions from the parafovea determined with psychophysical testing showed either significant fla...

A 48-year-old male patient with diabetes mellitus and retinitis pigmentosa was admitted with complaints of weakness of both lower limbs and urinary incontinence of 1year duration. Fundoscopy was suggestive of retinitis pigmentosa. On admission, the power in the legs was about Grade 2. Plain X-ray showed a sickle-shaped defect of the sacrum scimitar sacrum (Figure 1). MRI showed an anterior pres...

We performed histopathologic and immunofluorescence studies of autopsy eyes from a 73-year-old woman with autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa from a family with reduced penetrance. Light microscopic examination showed extensive photoreceptor loss in most regions. In the temporal midperiphery of the retina, there were patches of remaining photoreceptors, some arranged in rosettes. Electron m...

(1) HISTORICAL.-In the fully-developed state, choroideremia presents a characteristic and unmistakable picture of which Fig. 1 and Colour Plate 1(a and b) may be taken as examples. The almost total lack of choroidal vessels strongly suggests a developmental anomaly. In fact most of the early writers on, the subject, such as Mauthner (1872) and Koenig (1874), stressed the likeness to choroidal c...

Several studies have investigated the protective functions of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in retinitis pigmentosa. However, a BDNF-based therapy for retinitis pigmentosa is not yet available. To develop an efficient treatment for fundus disease, an eukaryotic expression plasmid was generated and used to transfect human 293T cells to assess the expression and bioactivity of BDNF on ...

Hereditary degenerations of the human retina are genetically heterogeneous, with well over 100 genes implicated so far. This Seminar focuses on the subset of diseases called retinitis pigmentosa, in which patients typically lose night vision in adolescence, side vision in young adulthood, and central vision in later life because of progressive loss of rod and cone photoreceptor cells. Measures ...