Science / Medicine : Alzheimer’s May Impair Eye Nerve

Alzheimer’s disease may selectively damage the visual nerve cells that are essential to a person’s orientation in space, according to a report by USC researchers in the January issue of the journal Ophthalmology.

In early research, Dr. Alfredo A. Sadun and his colleagues had documented how visual nerve damage might explain why some patients who suffer from the baffling dementia complain of visual nerve damage even though they test normal on standard eye exams.

The new findings are based on microscopic examination of tissue specimens from 10 Alzheimer’s patients and 10 controls. They demonstrate that the damage is concentrated in nerve cells that are responsible for depth perception, motion detection and spatial orientation, not the cells that control visual acuity.