Michigan State University (MSU) professors have discovered a link between diabetes and bone marrow nerve damage that may help treat one of the disease's most common and potentially blindness-causing complications.
According to excerpts from the article:
The key to better treating retinopathy — damage to blood vessels in the retina that affects up to 80 percent of diabetic patients — lies not in the retina but in damage to the nerves found in bone marrow that leads to the abnormal release of stem cells, said Julia Busik, an associate professor in MSU's Department of Physiology.
"With retinopathy, blood vessels grow abnormally in the retina, distort vision and eventually can cause blindness," said Busik, whose research appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine. "There has been a lot of progress in treating the complication, but most treatments use a laser that is painful to the patient and destroys parts of the retina."
"This opens up new avenues to better treatments outside of the retina that focus on stem cells and the causes of the nerve damage in bone marrow," said Busik, whose collaborators included other researchers from MSU and the University of Florida. "We know what happens in the retina and have treatments that are very invasive; we now can look at a host of other options."
Read the entire article here.
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