Editor鈥檚 note: As of 2024, the therapy discussed below remains experimental and is available only as part of a clinical trial. You can or email christine_callan@urmc.rochester.edu to find out more about ongoing or upcoming trials.
Maybe you鈥檝e recently suffered a stroke and are now starting therapy, trying to regain speech, motor functions, and possibly improve memory. But your vision is damaged, too, and there鈥檚 no therapy available.
Yet.
, director of research and the James V. Aquavella Professor of Ophthalmology at the 人妻少妇专区 Medical Center鈥檚 Flaum Eye Institute, has been working in over the last ten years to change that. Here鈥檚 how she sums up her latest results, published earlier this year in the journal :
鈥淚f people do exactly what we tell them and they don鈥檛 cheat, the success rate has been in our hands a 100 percent.鈥�
Listen here to the full QuadCast interview with Professor Krystel Huxlin.
podcast transcript (.docx)
Huxlin spoke at the inaugural Light & Sound Interactive conference in Rochester, jointly sponsored by the 人妻少妇专区 and the Rochester Institute of Technology, as part of a panel on blindness and visual impairment that addressed corrective, restorative and rehabilitative approaches.
According to Huxlin, rigorous visual training can restore some of the basic vision lost in stroke patients with damage in the primary visual cortex. Damage to this area of the brain prevents visual information from getting to other brain regions that help make sense of it, causing loss of sight in one-quarter to one-half of the person鈥檚 normal field of vision.
鈥淭raditionally it was thought that you cannot do anything about this. But one of the things we have discovered is that strokes rarely destroy the entire parts of the brain that process visual information,鈥� Huxlin says. Her therapy involves training other, undamaged parts of the brain to take over鈥攊n a way, like starting a backup system.
The downside of pioneering a therapy is that Huxlin has a long waiting list of patients eager to be enrolled in her next study. So, if you are looking for a vision therapist today, your chances are slim.
鈥淲e feel like the lone voice in the wilderness,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 my hope that in the next few decades there will be more scientists who turn their attention to this problem and ways of resolving it.鈥�
The good news is that her team is about to start a clinical trial for her therapy, funded in part by the 人妻少妇专区, NYSTAR, the Data Science Institute, and Envision LLC. An FDA approval process for the treatment is to follow. Huxlin hopes the therapy can be rolled out to stroke victims across the United States within the next two years.
鈥淲e really have no time to waste,鈥� she says. 鈥淭here is a saying in the neurology community that time is brain. And I would say in this case鈥攖ime is vision.鈥�
The therapy is geared toward those whose visual system in the brain is damaged from traumatic brain injury, stroke, or a tumor. It鈥檚 not really designed to help those whose eyes are physically damaged, although Huxlin says it might also improve the ability to use vision in the latter group.
During the therapy, patients, steadied by a headrest, fix their eyes on a particular spot on a computer screen, in order to follow a visual stimulus that moves markers across the screen into the patients鈥� blind field. They try to locate and describe the marker鈥檚 attributes鈥搘hether it鈥檚 moving left or right, horizontally, or vertically鈥攚ithout moving their eyes and receive immediate feedback about their accuracy. Done for about an hour each day, for weeks, sometimes months, this approach trains patients鈥� brains to relearn to see correctly within those blind fields.
鈥淲e give them feedback and make them do it thousands of times,鈥� explains Huxlin.
Now Huxlin is hoping to get the word out鈥攖o both patients and the medical community at large鈥攖hat there鈥檚 real hope for restoring and relearning vision.
鈥淗onestly, it should be administered just as automatically to patients with strokes as physical therapy is.鈥�
