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ISLAMABAD: Over two million Pakistanis are blind and 80 percent of them could have been cured had they been diagnosed at an early stage, Al-Shifa Trust Eye Hospitals Executive Director Brig (r) Rizwan Asghar said on Sunday.

He said that data available with Al Shifa showed that lack of basic facilities in far-flung areas and unawareness about the timely check-up were the major causes of eyes diseases and ultimately blindness in the country.

"In last one year, we conducted 40,000 eye surgeries, 350,000 patients were treated and half a million people were screened for possible eye disorders," Asghar said.

Sharing the annual report of the trust with the media, he said that the trust was increasing its services by ten percent annually. "Only the private sector cannot cope with the challenge of blindness as eye diseases are increasing at a fast pace," he said.

"Our population is increasing at an alarming rate. This is putting a strain on services such as sanitation and cleanliness. Many of the viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi that can invade the human body are also capable of attacking the surface or interior of the eye," he said.

"Unfortunately, diseases that damage the retina, the optic nerve, or the blood vessels that feed them often cause no pain at all, which is another major problem," he said.

"The trust is running its four state-of-the-art eye hospitals in Rawalpindi, Sukkur, Kohat and Muzaffarabad. The hospital in Rawalpindi has a capacity of 250 beds. It has 40 highly-qualified eye surgeons and disease specialists. They treat about 1,200 patients daily and conduct 80 to 100 operations per day," he said.

Eyesight development:

A new study suggests that vision develops until midlife. This may have a significant impact on people with amblyopia, which is an eye disorder that causes what is commonly known as a "lazy eye".

A team of researchers led by Kathryn Murphy, a professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, set out to examine the evolution of the primary visual cortex in the human brain by analysing the postmortem brain tissue of 30 people, ranging in age from 20 days to 80 years.

Until now, the accepted view has been that in humans, the maturation of the primary visual cortex is completed in the first few years of life.

This traditional belief was based on anatomical studies of how the synapses are formed, as well as how connections within the cortex and between the cortex and other brain regions occur.

Murphy and colleagues looked at the so-called GABAergic activity in the brain. GABA stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid, and "GABAergic" refers to the brain's ability to produce it.

GABA is a neurotransmitter whose main function is to inhibit the action of another neurotransmitter called glutamate.

Their former study looked at the balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain, and how it is linked to the plasticity and aging of the visual cortex. The researchers followed the maturation of this brain region and showed how these GABAergic mechanisms change across the human lifespan.

This previous research showed that the GABA-producing mechanisms continue to mature until quite late in life. However, it still was not clear whether all of the mechanisms that regulate the plasticity of the synapses behaved in the same way.

GABA is inhibitory, but what about the excitatory neurotransmitters and synapses?

The researchers found that some of the glutamatergic proteins - that is, the ones that produce the excitatory glutamate - develop until late childhood, but others develop until around the age of 40.

Read more:
DailyTimes | 'Lack of proper treatment, awareness main causes of ... - Daily Times

This entry was posted on June 12, 2017 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |