New research out of The University of California Irvine School of Biological Sciences and the School of Medicine investigated the brain’s ability to recover vision from inherited blindness. Sunil Gandhi, professor of neurobiology and behavior and the corresponding author, explained that “Seeing involves more than intact and functioning retinae. It starts in the eye, which sends signals throughout the brain. It’s in the central circuits of the brain where visual perception actually arises.” The researchers were examining treatment for Leber congential amaurosis for adults with “inherited retinal diseases distinguished by severe visual impairment at birth.” They found that “The central visual pathway signaling was significantly restored in adults, especially the circuits that deal with information coming from both eyes,” and the “restoration of visual function at the level of the brain was much greater than expected from the improvements we saw at the level of the retinae. The fact that this treatment works so well in the central visual pathway in adulthood supports a new concept, which is that there is latent potential for vision that is just waiting to be triggered.”
Recovering Vision After Inherited Blindness
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