Word: macular
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...elderly man develops macular degeneration, a disease that destroys vision. To bolster his failing eyesight, he receives a transplant of healthy retinal tissue--cloned from his own cells and cultivated in a lab dish...
CHEERS! Another one for wine. As little as one glass a month--red or white--may cut in half the risk of macular degeneration...
Even now, however, Ernest and his colleagues cannot be certain they are on the right track. Too many promising treatments for macular degeneration, they caution, have failed to produce discernible benefits. But if they--and other researchers around the world--are on to something basic, then eventually ophthalmologists will be able to help their patients, perhaps not to cure macular degeneration (that would be too much to hope for), but at least to stop its relentless progression...
...sure, macular degeneration, which currently affects an estimated 10 million Americans, is not a fatal disorder. But it can be cruelly debilitating. For while the macula (named after the Latin word for spot) is no wider than a pencil, it is a hundred times more sensitive to small-scale features than the rest of the retina. Without a healthy macula, people cannot read a newspaper, recognize a friend, thread a needle, watch TV, safely negotiate stairs or see much of anything...
Until now, physicians have been able to offer only palliative care to patients with macular degeneration: more powerful eyeglasses; visual aids, such as machines that enlarge print; and, for a minority of cases--those that involve the invasive growth of blood vessels--laser therapy that sometimes slows down the disease, at least for a time. But only 10% of those in whom macular degeneration is diagnosed develop this more rapidly progressing, invasive form of the disease. For them, experts agree, intervention is needed earlier, before so much visual acuity is lost...