Scientists Found a Secret Weapon That May Stop Blindness Before It Starts
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Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of blindness in people over the age of 50, and while there are treatments, there are few options to stop the degradation in its tracks once the disease has taken hold.
A new study finds that the molecule apolipoprotein M, or ApoM—known for its protective and anti-inflammatory qualities—could help clear away vision-damaging cholesterol deposits as they accumulate in the retina.
Not only could an increased dose of ApoM in the bloodstream help ward off AMD, the molecule could be useful in treating certain heart ailments as well.
The human eye is a wonder of evolution, but it's also host to a variety of maladies that can make a once clear, crisp, and colorful world a dull and blurry one. One of the most prevalent of these vision-based ailments is age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—when the central part of our retina (the macula) begins to waste away. This begins with changes in the retinal pigmented epithelium, which guard the inside and outside of the retinal, as they begin failing to clear waste away from the eye. AMD is the leading cause of blindness in people over 50, and the disease leads to an overall loss of central vision, which is needed for reading, driving, and recognizing faces (all pretty important stuff).
Now, a team of researchers—led by scientists at Washington University (WashU) in St. Louis—has found a handy molecule that could possibly help treat AMD as well as certain ailments in the heart. Known as apolipoprotein M, or ApoM, this molecule is a lipocalin (an extracellular protein capable of transporting hydrophobic molecules) that binds with the bioactive lipid sphingosine-1-phosphate, or S1p. The new study found that when this protein was increased in the bloodstream, it helped clear away the cholesterol-rich deposits in the eye that lead to AMD. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications.
'Current therapies that reduce the chance of further vision loss are limited to only the most advanced stages of macular degeneration and do not reverse the disease,' Rajendra S. Apte, the senior author of the study from WashU, said in a press statement. 'Our findings suggest that developing treatments that increase ApoM levels could treat or even prevent the disease and therefore preserve people's vision as they age.'
These cholesterol deposits are only the beginning of a patient's problems when experiencing AMD. Someone might not experience any vision loss in the early stages of this disease, but the deposits eventually increase inflammation and eventually lead to 'dry' macular degeneration caused by geographic atrophy—a kind of neurodegeneration that's also found in Alzheimer's patients. While treatable, this advanced stage of AMD is not reversible.
However, new treatment using ApoM—which, in recent years, has been shown to be a protective molecule with anti-inflammatory attributes—could potentially stop AMD before it develops past the point of no return. When tested in mice, the rodents showed evidence of improved retinal health, including both better performance from light-sensing cells in the retina and reduced cholesterol build-up.
Of course, there's another area of the body particularly sensitive to cholesterol—the heart. Amazingly, the researchers also found that ApoM could also play a pivotal role in treating certain heart diseases.
'One of the exciting things about this collaboration is realizing the links between retinal pigment epithelial cells and heart muscle cells, which are both vulnerable to low ApoM,' Ali Javeheri, a co-author of the study from WashU, said in a press statement. 'It is possible that the interaction between ApoM and S1P is regulating cholesterol metabolism in both cell types.'
The eye is undoubtedly one of the most impressive organs we have, and a new era of vision medicine aims to keep it that way, even as we age through the years.
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