Ophthalmology Commons^™

Cost Effect Of Surgeon And Patient Discretion In Regard To Cataract Surgery, Tyler D. Oostra, Thomas F. Mauger

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the cost effect of surgeon and patient discretion in regard to cataract surgery and how this affects population health care costs. Methods: A model of cataract progression was created from preexisting published data and combined with mortality data and Medicare cataract statistics to estimate the effect of mortality on decreasing the rate of cataract surgery if surgery was delayed until any cataract progression occurred.

Results: Five-year cataract progression rates were determined for a given patient age, sex, and type of cataract. Combined with 5-year death rates, delaying surgery until progression occurred …

Cone Phosphodiesterase-6Γ’ Subunit Augments Cone Pde6 Holoenzyme Assembly And Stability In A Mouse Model Lacking Both Rod And Cone Pde6 Catalytic Subunits, Wen-Tao Deng, Saravanan Kolandaivelu, Astra Dinculescu, Jie Li, Ping Zhu, Vince A. Chiodo, Visvanathan Ramamurthy, William W. Hauswirth

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Rod and cone phosphodiesterase 6 (PDE6) are key effector enzymes of the vertebrate phototransduction pathway. Rod PDE6 consists of two catalytic subunits PDE6α and PDE6β and two identical inhibitory PDE6γ subunits, while cone PDE6 is composed of two identical PDE6α’ catalytic subunits and two identical cone-specific PDE6γ’ inhibitory subunits. Despite their prominent function in regulating cGMP levels and therefore rod and cone light response properties, it is not known how each subunit contributes to the functional differences between rods and cones. In this study, we generated an rd10/cpfl1 mouse model lacking rod PDE6β and cone PDE6α’ subunits. Both rod and …

Microtubule Imaging Reveals Cytoskeletal Deficit Predisposing The Retinal Ganglion Cell Axons To Atrophy In Dba/2j, Denis Sharoukhov, Festa Bucinca-Cupallari, Hyungsik Lim

Publications and Research

PURPOSE: Glaucoma is characterized by progressive loss of the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) and their axons. Here we test an outstanding notion that microtubules (MTs) within RGC axons degrade before the loss of morphology (‘‘MT hypothesis’’).

METHODS: The integrity of axonal MTs was interrogated by intrinsic second-harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy. Using DBA/2J mice as a model of glaucoma and DBA/2J-Gpnmbþ as a nonglaucomatous control, the relationship between MT disruption and morphology was quantitatively examined as a function of age and sex in the fresh retinal wholemounts.

RESULTS: The mean SHG density (i.e., the mean SHG intensity per thickness) was significantly …

Cgas Drives Noncanonical-Inflammasome Activation In Age-Related Macular Degeneration, Nagaraj Kerur, Shinichi Fukuda, Daipayan Banerjee, Younghee Kim, Dongxu Fu, Ivana Apicella, Akhil Varshney, Reo Yasuma, Benjamin J. Fowler, Elmira Baghdasaryan, Kenneth M. Marion, Xiwen Huang, Tetsuhiro Yasuma, Yoshio Hirano, Vlad Serbulea, Meenakshi Ambati, Vidya L. Ambati, Yuji Kajiwara, Kameshwari Ambati, Shuichiro Hirahara, Ana Bastos-Carvalho, Yuichiro Ogura, Hiroko Terasaki, Tetsuro Oshika, Kyung Bo Kim, David R. Hinton, Norbert Leitinger, John C. Cambier, Joseph D. Buxbaum, M. Cristina Kenney, Bradley D. Gelfand, Jayakrishna Ambati

Ophthalmology and Visual Science Faculty Publications

Geographic atrophy is a blinding form of age-related macular degeneration characterized by retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) death; the RPE also exhibits DICER1 deficiency, resultant accumulation of endogenous Alu-retroelement RNA, and NLRP3-inflammasome activation. How the inflammasome is activated in this untreatable disease is largely unknown. Here we demonstrate that RPE degeneration in human-cell-culture and mouse models is driven by a noncanonical-inflammasome pathway that activates caspase-4 (caspase-11 in mice) and caspase-1, and requires cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS)-dependent interferon-β production and gasdermin D-dependent interleukin-18 secretion. Decreased DICER1 levels or Alu-RNA accumulation triggers cytosolic escape of mitochondrial DNA, which engages cGAS. Moreover, caspase-4, gasdermin …

Sarcoidosis Presenting As Wallenberg Syndrome And Panuveitis, M. Oks, A. Li, M. Makaryus, H. D. Pomeranz, M. Sachdeva, J. Pullman, D. Schwartz, H. Steinberg

Journal Articles

© 2018 The Authors Sarcoidosis is a multi-system disease with neurological involvement being one of the more rare manifestations. We report a case of a patient who presented with the lateral medullary syndrome and panuveitis as her initial manifestation of sarcoidosis. The patient's course was further complicated by renal involvement. Lacrimal gland and renal biopsies showed noncaseating granulomas without evidence of infection, establishing the diagnosis. Intracranial vertebral artery involvement was confirmed by brain imaging. Bilateral hilar lymphadenopathy with upper lobe predominant nodules on chest imaging was consistent with asymptomatic pulmonary involvement. Systemic steroid therapy is indicated for treatment of ocular …

Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer: One Family's Story, H. M. Zylberberg, K. Sultan, S. Rubin

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Cataract Blindness: Socioeconomic Factors Associated With Treatment Barriers And High Blindness Rates For Women In Rural Regions Of Andhra Pradesh, Kiranpreet Kaur

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

Despite efforts of Vision 2020 in India, the 2001 Andhra Pradesh Eye Disease Study (APEDS) extrapolated that approximately 18.7 million blind people resided in India and projected an increase to 31.6 million blind people by 2020. Within the Andhra Pradesh state itself, the preventable blindness population had increased from approximately 1,143,150 people in 1990 to 1,402,264 people in 2001, against reformation attempts by the National Program for Control of Blindness. Of this, cataracts were consistently the leading cause of avoidable blindness. Numerous public health studies have been conducted to outline factors that preclude treatment of avoidable cataract blindness in the …