A Doctor Envisions Better Eye Care for the Poor

When Dr. Richard Casey went to Harvard Medical School 22 years ago, he had no idea that glaucoma and other causes of blindness were six times more common among African Americans than among whites. Nobody did.

But since that time, research studies and the clinical experiences of Casey and other eye doctors have provided powerful evidence that race and ethnicity are important factors when it comes to vision problems.

Poverty only compounds the trouble. The key to treating eye disease is early detection -- something that is woefully absent in many urban neighborhoods.

“Children need screening, and the schools really don’t have the facilities or the funds” to provide it, says Casey, head of ophthalmology at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center and a leading specialist at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA.

So, three years ago, Casey and five other African American doctors founded the Los Angeles Eye Institute with the idea of reaching out to Compton, South-Central Los Angeles and nearby areas in which access to health care is lacking for a great number of residents.

The story of how Casey and his colleagues launched L.A. Eye is a testament to the tremendous power that can be deployed when private citizens, government and business all pull together to take on a problem.

The institute’s mission began with helping kids. In the last two years, L.A. Eye has furnished the doctors and technicians necessary to check 16,000 youngsters around the city. Meanwhile, the LensCrafters Foundation -- the charitable arm of giant eyeglass chain LensCrafters Inc. -- has contributed the use of its mobile unit for eye examinations and 6,000 pairs of glasses.

The LensCrafters Foundation was recruited by Shea Hamilton, L.A. Eye’s director of community outreach.

“I saw kids had problems in school because they couldn’t see,” says Hamilton, former staff assistant to Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson).

Beginning next month, the institute will visit schoolyards in the Los Angeles Unified School District using a bus of its own, bought with a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. LensCrafters will continue to provide spectacles, as well as lens makers and other equipment for the new bus.

And surely children will continue to pen thank-you notes such as the one from Seylin Ramos, who was convinced that she could not see from her right eye -- until she was examined and given glasses.

“First, I couldn’t believe it,” she wrote to the institute and the “LensCrafter people.” “I closed my left eye and still I could see.”

For the adult community, L.A. Eye has worked out of the King/Drew Medical Center in Compton, where crowding is intense. It takes nine months to get an appointment there and a four-hour wait when the scheduled day finally arrives, institute officials say.

But next month the institute is moving into its own clinic in Lynwood with the help of a $1-million grant from the California Endowment. The endowment, a statewide health foundation with $3 billion in assets, has given out about $1 billion to community-based organizations such as L.A. Eye.

At the Lynwood center, L.A. Eye also will have the help of

Allergan Inc. The Irvine-based pharmaceutical company specializes in remedies for eye diseases, including glaucoma, an affliction caused by pressure within the eye. If untreated, glaucoma over time can damage the optic nerve and lead to tunnel vision and possibly blindness.

Dr. Kerry Cox, medical director of L.A. Eye, encountered Allergan executives at a medical conference, where they were talking about the company’s need for testing sites.

He told them about the institute, and Allergan is now contributing state-of-the-art equipment to the Lynwood clinic. “They want to do testing nationwide,” Cox says, “but there are no other organizations doing what we do here.”

The Lynwood facility is designed to be temporary. In a few years, L.A. Eye hopes to open a major clinic adjacent to King/Drew to bring expanded ophthalmic care to the South-Central community.

To build that center, which will cost about $20 million,

L.A. Eye will need federal money as well as private donations from supporters similar to the companies that back its work now.

Among these firms are Alcon Laboratories, a pharmaceutical division of Nestle Inc. specializing in eye care; Northrop-Grumman Corp; and United Parcel Service Inc.

Cox fully expects that the funding will come together, in large part because the link

between eye disease and ethnicity is finally being recognized.

“African ancestry” is listed on Allergan’s Web site as a risk factor for glaucoma. And other ethnic groups represented in South-Central Los Angeles, including Latinos and Asians, may share a predisposition to eye trouble, experts say.

Two decades ago, nobody had measured the prevalence of eye disease among African Americans.

“I took an elective course in medical statistics at Harvard,” recalls Casey, and the pattern began to emerge. Intrigued, he followed up with clinical work and then returned to Harvard, where he further pinned down the connection.

The other driving force behind L.A. Eye -- that poor people have precious little health coverage and access to good medical care -- is hardly something that Casey needed to be educated on. He knew about those trends simply from growing up in Willowbrook, just north of Compton.

Casey attended Occidental College and then went on to medical school in Cambridge, Mass., where he says his professors gave him his marching orders: “Do something that will have an impact in the greater community.”

That’s a good thought for all of us during this season, and the spirit behind The Times Holiday Campaign.

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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.