A new discovery by researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden may offer fresh hope to people with glaucoma, a common eye disease that can lead to permanent blindness.
This condition slowly damages the optic nerve, often due to high pressure inside the eye. Over time, this can cause people to lose their vision, starting from the sides and eventually going blind if not treated.
Current treatments like eye drops, laser procedures, or surgery aim to lower eye pressure, but they don’t always work well for everyone.
Now, scientists have taken a new approach. Instead of only focusing on eye pressure, they looked at how the retina—the sensitive layer at the back of the eye that detects light—gets its energy. Healthy vision needs the retina to work well, and that means its metabolism, or how it uses nutrients, must be strong.
For many years, scientists thought a substance in the body called homocysteine might be linked to glaucoma. But when researchers tested rats with glaucoma, they found that higher levels of homocysteine didn’t make the disease worse.
Then, they looked at glaucoma patients and found that having more homocysteine in the blood didn’t mean the disease would get worse, either. People who had genes that made them more likely to have high homocysteine also weren’t more likely to develop glaucoma. That led the scientists to believe homocysteine is not the cause of the disease.
Instead, they discovered something more important: the retina’s ability to use vitamins properly seems to be affected in glaucoma. When the retina can’t use vitamins well, its metabolism slows down, and the tissue becomes weaker and more likely to be damaged.
Dr. James Tribble, a lead author of the study, said their team believed that these problems with metabolism showed a loss of vitamin-related activity in the retina. So, they decided to test what happens if they give back those vitamins.
In their experiment, the scientists gave rats and mice with glaucoma a mix of vitamin B6, B9 (also known as folate), B12, and choline. These nutrients are important for keeping cells healthy and supporting energy use.
The results were impressive. In mice whose glaucoma developed slowly, the damage to the optic nerve completely stopped. In rats with faster-developing glaucoma, the disease slowed down a lot.
What’s more, these changes happened without lowering the pressure inside the eye. That means the vitamins were helping in a different way—by making the retina’s metabolism work better, not by changing the pressure.
Because the results were so encouraging, the researchers have started a clinical trial in Stockholm, Sweden. Patients with two types of glaucoma are being tested to see if the vitamins can help slow or stop the disease.
If this vitamin treatment works in humans, it could change the way doctors treat glaucoma. Instead of just trying to lower eye pressure, they might also focus on feeding the retina with the right nutrients to keep it healthy.
This study adds to a growing idea that the health of the retina and how it uses nutrients are very important in preventing or slowing vision loss. And it shows that something as simple as a vitamin supplement could protect our eyes from going blind.
If you care about eye health, please read studies about how vitamin B may help fight vision loss, and MIND diet may reduce risk of vision loss disease.
For more information about eye disease, please see recent studies about how to protect your eyes from glaucoma, and results showing this eye surgery may reduce dementia risk.
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