Very curious why you'd take this approach over something like the Boston Keratoprosthesis (https://eyewiki.org/Boston_Type_1_Keratoprosthesis). With a history of cornea rejection, mine has been stable for almost 16 years.
There are some circumstances where a keratoprosthesis won’t work, particularly if the eye has no tear production. OOKP is a good technique in some where they are blind in both eyes from severe ocular surface issues but the retina is still intact. It is very resource intensive and involves a number of subspecialty areas, and so is a last ditch effort for the bilaterally blind.
> Many studies have shown the incidence of repair procedures and worse final vision outcomes were higher in groups with autoimmune conditions (SJS, OCP). The difference in outcomes appears to be related to the degree and cumulative past period of inflammation. Overall most favorable outcomes are achieved in non-cicatrizing conditions, followed by ocular burns and OCP with the worst outcomes in SJS patients.
The patient in the article was a SJS patient
> The massage therapist says he could see just fine until he was 13 years old, when he took some ibuprofen after a school basketball game, triggering a rare auto-immune reaction known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome.
>It involves removing a patient's tooth, usually the canine, installing a plastic optical lens inside it, and then implanting the whole thing into the eye.
How fitting that the material usually comes from eyeteeth!
Had to bite and check this out after disbelief from the headline that such a thing was going on. Pretty wacky. But also amazing that some doc/researcher out there ran with a hunch to figure out if this was an option to help some people improve their lives. Sci-fi vibes but appreciate the motive.
This is the first I'd heard of this, and I did some poking around, and came to the conclusion that this surgery is ~mostly obsolete --- which is an answer (for me) to the question of "don't they have a better substance to use as a lens substrate than tooth?"
I wonder how this surgery was originally 1) invented 2) proposed to colleagues.
"Hey peeps, I've been bouncing around this idea lately. So you know how Mrs Smith in room 230 has no eyesight left? Well one of her teeth came off when she fell last night, and I started thinking.."
One thing I don't understand is how the surgeon ensures the lens is positioned correctly. We're talking about a rigid lens that can no longer be controlled via muscles, right? Doesn't any misalignment mean you get a fuzzy image at best? And even if you can get a sharp image for some given, fixed distance, you still can't control whether to focus on near things or far things when you look, right??
If you've ever played around with a magnifying glass, they accept a surprising amount of tilt. It's not a clear image, but a blurry image is better than no image.
This surgery is for people who've had their eyes destroyed by chemicals or similar. They don't always have the structure remaining for any finer control.
I mean it's a bit gross, but the version of the headline I saw made me think it was some kind of in-mouth camera and I was wondering how on earth they routed the optic nerve down there (silly of me perhaps, because I've read about this before, but that's how it took me initially).
Grossness aside, it's pretty interesting that the need for biocompatibility made this something worth considering at all though.
Readit News
> Many studies have shown the incidence of repair procedures and worse final vision outcomes were higher in groups with autoimmune conditions (SJS, OCP). The difference in outcomes appears to be related to the degree and cumulative past period of inflammation. Overall most favorable outcomes are achieved in non-cicatrizing conditions, followed by ocular burns and OCP with the worst outcomes in SJS patients.
The patient in the article was a SJS patient
> The massage therapist says he could see just fine until he was 13 years old, when he took some ibuprofen after a school basketball game, triggering a rare auto-immune reaction known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome.
Google Image Search:
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=Boston+Keratoprosthesi...
How fitting that the material usually comes from eyeteeth!
"Hey peeps, I've been bouncing around this idea lately. So you know how Mrs Smith in room 230 has no eyesight left? Well one of her teeth came off when she fell last night, and I started thinking.."
This surgery is for people who've had their eyes destroyed by chemicals or similar. They don't always have the structure remaining for any finer control.
Suggested headline: "Surgery implants tooth material in eye as scaffolding for lens" or something like that?
Grossness aside, it's pretty interesting that the need for biocompatibility made this something worth considering at all though.
[English translation: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2GD7q7-wA&si=2ZuxnqxYxoT...]