Word: eye
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...group of researchers claim to have found a much easier method of detecting the disease. In a study published in last week's issue of Science, they report that Alzheimer's patients are unusually sensitive to a drug used by ophthalmologists to enlarge the pupils during eye exams. By measuring a person's response to the drug when it is dropped into the eye, physicians may be able to diagnose the dread disorder...
...idea for the eye test came from Huntington Potter, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, who ingeniously followed up on an observation about people with Down syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes mental retardation. Potter knew that almost all Down patients who live long enough eventually develop brain lesions identical to those detected in autopsies of Alzheimer's sufferers. By scouring the scientific literature, he learned that people with Down syndrome are very sensitive to tropicamide, the drug used to dilate the pupil of the eye. Potter then approached Leonard Scinto, a neuroscientist now at Brigham and Women's Hospital...
Together they studied 58 people whose ages averaged 72 and some of whom had already been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. After dropping a weak solution of tropicamide into their subjects' eyes, the researchers found the pupils in the healthy patients dilated only 4%, while the pupils of those with the disease opened at least 13%. Particularly telling was the case of a man whose eye-test results suggested that he had Alzheimer's but who had exhibited none of the symptoms -- until nine months later when his memory deteriorated dramatically...
...deterioration in Alzheimer's patients. For those medications to work, however, physicians must administer them before there is any memory loss. "Otherwise, there isn't enough brain left for the drugs to work," Scinto notes. He and Potter plan to study 400 patients over the next year. If the eye test lives up to expectations, it could be on the market within the next two years...
...says. A manager at a local Denny's lets him use the rest room once a day to clean up. That was the first place he went after he hustled his body on Santa Monica Boulevard, earning $60. "You don't know how scary that is," he says, avoiding eye contact. "You don't know if you're going to be shot, stabbed or taken to Mexico...