Drugs developed to slow down the progress of Alzheimer's disease may protect patients at risk of eye damage from glaucoma, according to research published earlier this week.
UK scientists have identified for the first time that key proteins involved in Alzheimer's are also implicated in glaucoma, and suggest that there are strong similarities between the two conditions. However, they have stressed that the 500,000 people in the UK with glaucoma are not at a higher risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
The research was carried out by a team of scientists at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and funded by the Wellcome Trust. They developed a new technology for visualising nerve cell damage in the retina, known as detection of apoptosing retinal cells to demonstrate that the protein beta-amyloid, which causes the so-called 'plaque' lesions in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, also leads to nerve cell death in the retina.
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