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Swedish University researchers are looking at possible reasons to explain why, when a person gets an eye disease such as glaucoma, they can suffer loss of vision.
Eye diseases such as retinal detachment and glaucoma are regularly being explored but on a biochemical level that looks in-depthly ay the processes that happen within the eye when the disease has taken hold.
These researchers are trying to comprehend the diseases on a biomechanical level, as it was already known that such eye diseases had a mechanical component.
The Department of Biology at Lund University have collaborated with researchers from the Department of Clinical Sciences to look into a method to investigate how vital the biomechanical environment is within the central nervous system.
Retinal tissue was lab grown from adult pigs in a state as close to the normal mechanical state of a living human eye, i.e. stretched. Unstretched tissue in cultures is rendered useless after a few days when it effectively dies after the retina's mechanical balance is disturbed.
A far higher number of cells can survive when in the stretched state and allows studies to be prolonged in excess of a week. This will assist in helping to understand how biomechanical factors in our central nervous systems act when we are healthy and when we are inflicted with debilitation from disease.
The new data from the group concludes that when biomechanical balance is disturbed, such as in diseased eyes (retinal detachment, glaucoma) the retina loses normal functions resulting in vison impairment or blindness.