Patients with limited vision

Computer program helps restore vision in some cases
Patients with limited vision may be helped with an unusual computer program that uses “tiny points of light” to stimulate the brain and partially restore eyesight lost to strokes and other forms of trauma. For patients, the painless 40-minute to 60-minute-a-day treatment involves neither drugs nor surgery and helps restore some vision through a six-month regimen of flashing light. A chin rest holds the patient’s head steady as light dances on a computer screen. The flashes are calibrated to strike areas near the injured visual field. “This is called vision restoration therapy,” said Dr Mo Fouladvand, a neurologist at The Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Medical Center in Manhattan, which has the system. “Very simply, it is a computer program, which was designed by German scientists, and is based on the neuroplasticity of the brain.”

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt and form new connections, compensating for injured cells. “We believe that just as stimulation of the hands, arms and legs can help stroke patients regain movement, stimulation of the brain can help restore vision,” Fouladvand said. Not everyone with limited vision is a candidate for light therapy. But studies are showing that the computer-generated light can improve the quality of vision.

Drug-coated stents not for everyone
Two new studies are adding fuel to a growing debate about whether drug-eluting stents are being overused, with ill consequences for patients. The studies, both published in the May 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, included large groups of patients who were treated for narrowing in their coronary arteries with the stents, which are tiny drug-coated cylinders used to prop open blocked arteries. The drugs are released over time and help prevent blockages from scarring that occurred in 20 percent of patients following treatment with an earlier generation of bare metal stents.

Both studies found that the coated stents worked best in the kinds of patients for whom the device was approved by the Food and Drug Administration: people with short, single areas of narrowing in the arteries, who had no blood clots and had not suffered a heart attack. But many of the patients examined in the study were sicker, more complicated heart patients, and there the results differed—with one study finding a tenfold greater rate of complications in the sicker group than the second study did.